KristinLouiseSchreiberMD

Summary

• Kristin L. Schreiber, MD/PhD, is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, and Vice Chair of Faculty Development in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She completed her MD and a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota, investigating reciprocal neural-immune interactions involved in infection and the development of persistent pain. She completed residency training at the University of Pittsburgh, and fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she practices clinically as a Regional Anesthesiologist and Physician Scientist, receiving funding from the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Science Foundation (NSF). Her research program investigates the development of chronic pain after surgical injury, as well as worsening of chronic pain after cancer diagnosis or during social isolation. She employs pragmatic assessment of psychosocial and psychophysical phenotypic factors, in addition to biomarkers, clinical characteristics, and socio-demographics, to better predict which individual patients are most at risk. Her perioperative interventional studies incorporate this dense biopsychosocial assessment of individual patients into their design, to allow more nuanced assessment of differential efficacy of preventive perioperative interventions among patients, ranging from regional anesthesia and ketamine to yoga-based exercise and open-label placebo. In her quantitative sensory testing lab, she investigates differences in pain processing among individuals, including how subjective pain relates to changes in physiology, and what aspects of pain processing are modulated by non-opioid analgesic techniques.