Timothy R. Lubenow, MD, serves as VP of Fellow Education on the Executive Board of the American Society of Pain and Neuroscience (ASPN). He is a board-certified interventional pain specialist now practicing with MAPS Centers for Pain Control in the Chicago area, which he joined in late 2025 after nearly four decades at Rush University Medical Center.
Dr. Lubenow earned his medical degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1983, following undergraduate study at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He completed a rotating internship, an anesthesiology residency, and a pain medicine fellowship — along with a cardiac anesthesia fellowship — all at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and served as chief resident in anesthesiology there. He is board certified in anesthesiology and holds subspecialty certification in pain medicine.
Over more than 30 years at Rush, Dr. Lubenow rose to Professor of Anesthesiology at Rush Medical College, Chair of the Section of Pain Medicine, Program Director of the Pain Medicine Fellowship, and Medical Director of the Rush Pain Center, training hundreds of residents and pain fellows who went on to lead practices nationally. His clinical and research focus centers on interventional pain management and complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS); he contributed to development of the Budapest Criteria, the diagnostic standard used internationally for CRPS, and was among the first U.S. physicians to perform dorsal root ganglion (DRG) stimulation. He has published widely in the pain medicine literature and contributed chapters to major reference texts in the field.
His honors include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Rush University Medical Center (2025) and a Lifetime Achievement Award from ASPN (2023), along with repeated recognition in “Best Doctors in America,” Castle Connolly’s “Top Doctors,” and Chicago Magazine’s “Top Doctors” listings spanning more than two decades.