Rachel Pain is Professor of Human Geography at Newcastle University since 2017 and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2018.
She previously served as Deputy Head of Department of Geography at Durham University, and was also the Co-Founder/Director of the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action and the Participatory Research Hub. Per Scopus, Pain has a h-index of 42.[1][2] In 2022, she was conference chair of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers annual conference.