Research Statement
My research concerns better ways to measure pain, to understand its causes, and to represent the vast variation in individual responses to objectively similar painful situations. One particular focus has been the development of pain measurement approaches that encourage natural description of the pain experience without reference to arbitrary numbers. Clinically Aligned Pain Assessment (CAPA) is now used as the primary pain assessment in the University of Utah Hospital. The Visual Time Analog is a parallel measurement developed for research application. The complex multidimensional construct of pain is difficult to study without an overarching methodological perspective. New developments in statistical and causal modeling have been critical for these investigations, and many of my publications are either applications of these methods or didactic illustrations of the new methods. My colleagues and I believe that integrated methods, theory, and clinical understanding should inform design and interpretation of our studies. In addition to my work as Director of the Pain Research Center, I am Senior Strategic Statistician for the College of Nursing at the University of Utah, and am an affiliate Member of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where I maintain an active program in Quality of Life research.
Research Keywords
- Pain
- Pain Measurement
- Statistics
- Causal Inference
- Applied Statistics
- Pain psychology
Copyrights
- Clnically Aligned Pain Assessment (CAPA). Gary Donaldson, Dept. of Anesthesiology, Brenda Gulliver, University of Utah Hospital, 01/08/2013.
Languages
- English, fluent.