Increasing Accessibility for Pain and Symptom Management Interventions in Patients with Cancer

Sponsored by the Ewald W. Busse Lectureship Tamara Somers, PhD, is a Professor with Tenure in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, a member of the Pain Prevention and Treatment Research Laboratory at Duke, and a faculty member at the Duke Cancer Institute (DCI) and member of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at DCI. Dr. Somers is trained as a clinical psychologist who has extensive experience in the development and testing of behavioral symptom management intervention protocols for patients with pain and other symptoms due to cancer and other chronic diseases. Dr. Somers' program of research is in creating accessible and scalable behavioral symptom management interventions often using mobile health delivery modalities to improve patient access to interventions. She completed one of the first behavioral intervention symptom management trials to use a Sequential, Multiple Assignment, Randomized Trial (SMART; R01CA202779). This trial examined doses of a behavioral pain intervention and provided novel information on scaling and personalization of behavioral pain interventions. She is currently the PI of a project examining extending the reach of behavioral pain management to cancer patients receiving care in medically underserved areas using mobile health technologies (R01CA237892). Dr. Somers has a strong portfolio of local, national, and international funded research collaborations in behavioral pain management interventions including current R01 projects with investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital, Northwestern University, and North Carolina State University. She also has served as a mentor on several training awards in this area of work from both the NIH (i.e., K08, K99/R00, F32) and foundational training awards (e.g., American Cancer Society, Kornfeld Scholars Program). She has additionally collaborated with numerous colleagues and provided extensive mentoring and consultation in behavioral pain and symptom management and behavioral trial design through leadership roles the Palliative Care Research Cooperative Group and the Duke Roybal Center.