Chantal Berna Renella

Chantal Berna Renella heads the Centre for Integrative and Complementary Medicine (CEMIC) at the Lausanne University Hospital CHUV, which she has led since 2019, and is a professor at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of the University of Lausanne. She is a specialist in internal medicine, clinical hypnosis and psychosomatic medicine.

Her research looks at how pain is modulated and how hypnosis and other complementary techniques can help with chronic pain that resists treatment. She also studies how complementary medicine works and how integrative medicine can become part of hospital care. Her projects include hypnosis at home in palliative care, integrative care for homeless people in French-speaking Switzerland and open-label placebo for pain after surgery.

She studied medicine at the University of Geneva and earned a PhD in the neuroscience of pain at the University of Oxford. She then trained in interventional pain management at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where as a clinical researcher she developed programmes to help patients come off opioids. In 2015 she joined the CHUV Pain Management Centre, dividing her time between research and clinical work, with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.