Kristin Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D., a Recipient of the 2022 James E. Cottrell, M.D., Presidential Scholar Award

Abstract

was awarded this year's James E. Cottrell, M.D. Presidential Scholar Award. This is a well-deserved honor for such a superb clinician-scientist. Dr. Schreiber's work has helped us to understand which patients are at highest risk for developing persistent postsurgical pain, while also probing personalized interventions to prevent this often debilitating outcome. I have followed her work, which overlaps with my own areas of research interest, watching her career develop over time, and so it gives me great pleasure to honor Dr. Schreiber with a few words about her career.Kristin received a Bachelor of Science degree with honors, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, Wisconsin), majoring in Psychology and German. She then received an M.D./Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Work for her doctoral thesis investigated the bidirectional cross talk between the nervous and immune systems in pain and infection. She demonstrated this bidirectional communication in two diverse settings: activation of spinal microglia in the development of persistent and widespread pain, 1 and modulation of pathogen adherence and invasion in the gut by the enteric nervous system. 2,3 She went on to complete an Residency in Anesthesiology at the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), where she focused her passion for understanding the development of chronic pain into clinical applications in regional anesthesia 4 and the development of persistent postsurgical pain, 5 contributing to the peer-reviewed literature during a busy clinical residency. Dr. Schreiber joined us at Brigham and Women's Hospital for Regional Anesthesia and Research Fellowships in July 2012, simultaneously joining our faculty, where she is now Associate Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and a Staff Anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital specializing in Regional Anesthesia. During her 10 yr with our department, she has excelled both clinically as an exceptional Regional Anesthesiologist and a prolific translational Pain Neuroscientist.