C. Meghan McMurtry - Edit 1

- I'm really interested in the intersection of what people typically think of as physical and mental health or the mind-body connection. And pain, I think, is the epitome that really lies at the intersection in understanding psychology and medicine together. So the research that we conduct in the Pediatric Pain, Health and Communication Lab focuses on both acute pain and chronic pain. Acute pain is pain from things like needle procedures, such as immunizations and venipunctures for blood draws. And children undergo a lot of those procedures throughout the course of their childhood. In the needle contacts, one of the things that's really important to understand is the contribution of fear. And so people really kind of ignore the fact that when people are afraid of needles it actually makes it more painful less likely they're gonna show up and it creates all sorts of problems. And so one of the unique parts about our research lab and the research I conduct is that we study both pain and fear in the context of needle procedures to make them more comfortable for everybody. Getting this award means a recognition from the university that the research that we do is important, I'm the only one who sort of does this kind of research here and so it's really nice recognition. It also means that there's a value to our research from the university perspective and it allows us to conduct pilot studies and doing more innovative work that we can't necessarily get with great big grant funding app, but it allows us to sow the seeds and plant the foundation so that then we can get bigger grants down the road. It also allows me to support my graduate students, we have a very busy lab and it allows them to pursue the kinds of research that they wanna do as well.