Anita Holdcroft, the Emeritus Professor of Anaesthesia at Imperial College London, is a clinician specialising in acute pain medicine especially in females. She was the Secretary then Co-Chair of the International Association for the Study of Pain Special Interest Group on Sex, Gender and Pain to 2005. Now she is Past President of the Forum on Maternity and the Newborn and President of the Section of Anaesthesia at the Royal Society of Medicine.

Her laboratory and clinical pain research has attracted Medical Research Council and charitable grants, European Commission FP6 and FP7 awards as well as funded studentships and keynote international lectures. As author/editor she has written books such as ‘Principles and Practice of Obstetric Anaesthesia and Analgesia’, ‘Core Topics in Pain’, ‘Crises in Childbirth’. Other publications include chapters on ‘Sex and Gender Differences in Pain’ in Wall and Melzack’s Textbook of Pain and papers on gender medicine particularly relating to women and childbirth.

As a spin off from her research she champions academic women’s employment issues and led the Women in Academic Medicine (WAM) project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the BMA and the Medical Women’s Federation (MWF). She has co-chaired the BMA Medical Academic Staff Committee (MASC), is the chair of the MASC Regional Services Liaison Group and the MWF Treasurer.