American Academy of Nursing Celebrates UCSF Chronic Pain Expert

Christine Miaskowski, RN, PhD, FAAN, internationally recognized expert in pain and symptom management research and professor emerita at UC San Francisco’s School of Nursing, will be named a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing (AAN) this fall.

The Living Legend award is the academy’s highest honor, recognizing nursing trailblazers for their outstanding contributions to improving health and advancing the nursing profession.

Miaskowski, a UCSF professor for 35 years who retired in July, was selected for her extraordinary contributions over the course of her career that continue to have a positive impact, according to the award judges.

For more than three decades, she received funding totaling more than $75 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Aging, and published more than 750 papers that spawned new areas of pain research that continue to be studied today.

The driving purpose of Miaskowski’s research was to understand the risks and reasons for pain and other symptoms in patients with cancer. She shaped the field of oncology nursing and advanced the scientific understanding of pain alongside multiple other symptoms occurring at the same time. Her early research on opioids, with Jon Levine, MD, PhD, launched the field of sex-based differences in pain research.

Miaskowski received numerous honors and awards over her 50-year career, including the Distinguished Researcher Award from the Oncology Nursing Society, the Distinguished Merit Award from the International Society of Nurses in Cancer Care, the Wilbert Fordyce Clinical Investigator Award from the American Pain Society, and the Ada Sue Hinshaw Distinguished Research Award.

She was the first nurse to be awarded an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Fellowship. Most recently, she was honored by the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Prevention as one of seven scientists, and the only nurse, named a champion and change-maker of cancer pain control and symptom science.

Miaskowski will be recognized with the Living Legend designation at the academy’s annual Health Policy Conference in Washington D.C in October.

She is the tenth UCSF nursing professor to receive the AAN’s Living Legend recognition over the last two decades.