Allan Irwin Basbaum is a Canadian-American medical researcher, and professor and chair of the Department of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine. and a Fellow of the Royal Society in the United Kingdom.

Following upon our extensive earlier studies of the CNS circuits through which opioids exert their analgesic effects, our laboratory now examines the mechanisms through which tissue and nerve injury produce changes in the peripheral and central nervous system that result in persistent pain. In parallel studies we examine the circuits through which pruritogens generate itch. The hallmark of our work is a multidisciplinary approach to the problem, using molecular, neuroanatomical, pharmacological and behavioral analyses in wild type and genetically-modified mice, including knockouts and Cre- or reporter-expressing mice generated in our laboratory.