2016 Distinguished Service Award

Jennifer A. Haythornthwaite, PhD

 

Jennifer A. Haythornthwaite is Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Center for Mind-Body Research at Johns Hopkins University in the School of Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and then completed a clinical internship at the West Haven VA Medical Center and a research fellowship at the National Institute on Aging. Her research has been funded largely by NIH, including multiple institutes interested in understanding pain. She has served as the primary mentor for a number of K23-funded faculty and KL2-funded post-doctoral fellows as well as providing formal and informal mentoring to a network of post-doctoral fellows and junior and mid-career faculty. She regularly lectures on mentoring and academic career development, particularly about the importance and value of maximizing mentoring experiences.

Dr. Haythornthwaite’s scientific contributions have focused on the study of the psychosocial aspects of pain, particularly the impact of negative emotions and pain coping strategies on pain and pain-related disability. Her early work focused the impact of depressive symptoms on pain and pain-related disability and she later extended this work to demonstrate the impact of negative emotions and pain coping strategies on neuropathic pain. She has conducted randomized clinical trials of both pharmacological and psychological treatments for persistent pain. She is now investigating biobehavioral factors that increase risk for persistent pain and the neurobiology of pain catastrophizing.

 

The Distinguished Service Award recognizes outstanding and dedicated service to APS.