Grace Lim, MD, MSc

Dr. Lim is a board-certified obstetric (OB) anesthesiologist and physician scientist who is passionate about eliminating pain and suffering in special populations, optimizing perioperative medication use, and creating innovative and personalized approaches to care. She accomplishes these goals using a mix of clinical and translational approaches. Her methods focus on individualized (e.g., genetic, liquid biopsy, pharmacokinetic, patient-reported, quantitative sensory) and population-based approaches (e.g., large administrative data sets, integrated electronic health record analyses) to gain a holistic understanding of a health problem from both a population and personalized perspective.

Dr. Lim’s clinical practice and research work are dedicated to improving pain management and post-birth recovery by identifying safe and effective therapies. She has extensive formal and practical experience with clinical trials, prospective longitudinal cohort studies, observational research using administrative data sets, and patient-reported outcomes, pain measurement, psychological and psychophysical dimensions of pain and analgesia, and observational methods. Dr. Lim’s publications in high-impact journals cover topics including labor pain in vulnerable populations, depression, and perioperative and anesthesia-related outcomes. She has led complex and multidisciplinary teams across UPMC’s large health system on implementation to disseminate best practices for anesthesiology, at scale. These efforts include the widespread implementation of enhanced recovery after cesarean protocols, nitrous oxide labor analgesia, hemorrhage bundles, and postpartum analgesia bundles across UPMC maternity hospitals.