News

Welcome Drs. Steve Kinsey and Natalie Shook

From UConn Today

New Faculty Hope to Marry Nursing Research with Psychology, Neuroscience Studies

- Jaclyn Severance

She’s a psychologist who’s examining health disparities in underserved populations, who’s also looking at the impact of mindfulness on health behaviors and the experience of pain, and who won an award in 2017 for her mentoring of undergraduate students.

He’s a neuroscientist serving as the new director of the Center for Advancement in Managing Pain (CAMP) who won an outstanding researcher award in 2019 and is looking at ways to address acute pain.

Recent transplants from West Virginia, Natalie Shook and Steven Kinsey have brought their collaborative approaches to research and their interactive styles of teaching to the lab and the classroom as the UConn School of Nursing’s newest faculty members.

They’re also married, with two young children, and with diverse backgrounds of study and work that they hope will complement the expertise that the School of Nursing has already developed.

“Everything we do has to come around to health and improving lives in some way,” said Kinsey, who studies opioid and cannabinoid systems and how they control pain, inflammation, and stress response. While not from a nursing background, Kinsey sees his work – and the potential to make an impact, particularly in pain management – fitting closely with nursing’s philosophy and goals.

“I see us all as this continuum, and we’re asking questions just at kind of a different level,” he said. “Our goal really is to help reduce suffering, and it’s a lofty, broad goal, but it helps on the hard days to really hope that what we’re doing is going to contribute positively.”

Shook’s work in social psychology has, in recent years, delved more deeply into health domains, making the School of Nursing a natural fit for her research, she said, due to the many implications for health care providers and especially nurses, who often serve as the front lines of patient care.

“When we’re thinking about health disparities, one of the big issues that we have is that experience of discrimination, or at least the perception of discrimination,” she said. “We’ve got data to indicate that these underrepresented groups will delay seeking healthcare because of the perception that the health care providers may have some bias — whether explicit or implicit – but that will lead to forms of discrimination and just unpleasant experiences. Then, when they finally do seek help, it’s more severe, more problematic.”

Shook said that there are a lot of ways that her work could help to inform teaching and the day-to-day experience of practicing nurses, nursing students, and other faculty.

“A couple of lines of research that I have in my lab are looking at disease avoidance and immune function,” she said. “When this opportunity arose, it seemed like ideal timing, that being in School of Nursing would facilitate these programs of research. In looking at the faculty here, the sort of the research they’re doing and the patient populations that they’re working with, there seems to be a lot of overlap and ground for collaboration. Having colleagues right next door who have expertise right at hand, it just seemed like it would be a really nice marriage.”

Kinsey is particularly interested in exploring the pain-management potential of cannabinoids, an area where other School of Nursing researchers, particularly CAMP affiliates, are also delving.

“With CAMP, there’s a group of people here that are interested in different aspects of pain,” he said. “Pain is a huge problem. The treatments we have right now are either insufficient or have really bad side effects. Being part of a critical mass of people who are interested in different facets of pain was the big thing that attracted me to the School of Nursing here at UConn.”

In his leadership role at CAMP, Kinsey said he hopes to work as a coordinator – figuring out common goals and then trying to help achieve them. He said that, overall, the opportunity afforded by the UConn School of Nursing to work closely with colleagues was a significant draw for him.

“I have collaborators in different countries, and that’s great, but there’s nothing like being able to have coffee with somebody and have conversations,” Kinsey said. “There’s a feeling of really positive collaboration here at UConn, and a record of people actually doing that and not just talking about it – like, let’s do well together.”

To reach Shook or Kinsey, visit nursing.uconn.edu. For more information about the Kinsey Lab, visit kinsey.lab.uconn.edu.

New pathway to understand the mechanism of visceral pain

Development of a new pathway to manage the clinical pain is a clinical chalenge. Drs. Bin Feng and Guoan Zheng professors in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, have recently received a $2,030,740 grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to better understand the causes of chronic visceral pain in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to characterize the sensory neural cell bodies in a cluster of neurons known as the dorsal root ganglion, or DRG. These neural clusters are responsible for transmitting sensory messages of pain and touch from skin, as well as inner abdominal organs including the colon and rectum. Drs. Feng and Zheng will quantify the topological distribution of pain receptors called mechanonociceptors. These neurons respond to intense pressure on the colorectum. This project will help to define the molecular properties of mechano- and silent nociceptors, specifically in the thoracolumbar and lumbosacral DRG.

UConn Today

Call for Abstracts for the 10th Annual International Symposium of Ayurveda and Health

10th Annual International Symposium of Ayurveda and Health will be held on September 25-26, 2020 at UCONN Health Center in Farmington, CT.

Topics/Subjects of Interest, Not Limited:
Pain: (mental or physical,) not limited to any particular field or type. Observation, diagnosis, treatment, management, alternative approaches and therapies; herbs, food and applied Sciences, Current developments (clinical and/or research papers), Emerging trends in Pain Therapy. Diseases of Interest: Cancer, GI, IBS, Acid Reflex, Joint pain (arthritis), Heart Disease, Pediatric variances and Psychosomatic diseases.

People who are interested to submit an abstract to facilitate networking need to send it to Dr. Amala Guha: aguha1@att.net

Abstract deadline: December 15, 2019

Flyer

2019 CAMP Pain Symposium was Successfully Held

The CAMP annual symposium on “Opioid Use Disorder and Chronic Pain Management: Innovations in Research and Practice” was held successfully at UConn, Student Union on Nov. 1st, 2019.

The symposium brought scholars from different universities to give a speech about pain and pain management. The conference director, Dr. Xiaomei Cong started the opening remarks. Then, Drs. Steve Kinsey from West Virginia University, Dr. Burel Goordin from University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. William Shaw from UConn Health, Dr. Susan Dorsey from University of Maryland, Dr. Raymond Dionne from UConn Health, Dr. Bin Feng from University of Connecticut, Dr. Luana Colloca from University of Maryland, Dr. Melissa Santos from Connecticut’s Children’s Medical Center, Dr. Debra Lyon from University of Florida and Dr. Natalie Shook from West Virginia University presented keynote speech on different aspects of pain and pain management.

At the end of the symposium, the poster session was held at the School of Nursing and students presented their research.

Registration for the Pain Symposium-Nov 1st 2019

Center for Advancement in Managing Pain is pleased to announce the annual pain symposium on “Opioid Use Disorder and Chronic Pain Management Innovations in Research and Practice” which will be held on November 1st 2019 at UCONN Student Union Rm 331. We will have several internal and external pain experts speaking.

Please register here!

Registration is free for students and postdocs and $30 for faculty and staff.

CT Psychological Association (CPA) annual convention

Registration is now open for the Psychological Association (CPA) 33rd Annual Convention. The conference will be held on October 25, 2019 in Riverhouse at Goodspeed Station, Haddam CT 06438.

People who are interested to represent an existing poster to facilitate networking need to send email with existing abstract or a PDF of the poster to the CPA administrator:  tricia@grassrootsct.com

School of Nursing Participation in Mansfield Event

School of Nursing and Center for Advancement in Managing Pain had a booth in Mansfield event on September 21st to introduce the ongoing studies to the public population. Professors and students talked about the studies with interested people. Participation of school of nursing highlighted the  the closeness of the research aims with the common problems in the general population.

Jie Chen, PhD student, received ANF award!

Congratulations to Jie Chen, MSN, RN, our PhD student who has received a $25,000 grant award from the American Nurses Foundation (ANF) for his proposal Phenotyping and Biomarkers of Pain in Older Adults with Heart Failure. Jie Chen, his Major Advisor, Dr. Xiaomei Cong, and Co-Investigators, Dr. Angela Starkweather, Dr. Ming-hui Chen, Dr. Kendra Maas and Dr. Paula McCauley, will use the National Institute of Health Symptom Science Model (NIH-SSM) as conceptual framework. Their study will focus on phenotyping sex-specific pain by exploring the relationships among pain, symptom burdens, and quality of life in older adults with heart failure; and identifying biomarkers by differentiating patterns of gut microbiota and inflammatory cytokines between heart failure patients with and those without pain.