Professors Cynthia L. Renn of the University of Maryland School of Nursing and Man-Kyo Chung of the University of Maryland School of Dentistry team up to lead hub for chronic pain research.
Cynthia L. Renn, PhD ’04, MS ’97, RN, FAAN, UMSON professor and chair of the Department of Pain and Translational Symptom Science, has been named co-director of the University of Maryland Center to Advance Chronic Pain and Research (CACPR), joining Man-Kyo Chung, DMD, PhD, CACPR co-director and professor and assistant dean for research at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry (UMSOD). Renn served as a founding member of CACPR’s executive committee when the center was established in 2011.
CACPR’s mission is to cultivate and expand the cutting-edge multidisciplinary pain research portfolio at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) with the overarching goal of improved patient care and quality of life. It seeks to promote basic, translational, and clinical biomedical research to advance the understanding and treatment of chronic pain. As a catalyst for this process, the center engages multidisciplinary research teams and scientist-clinician collaborations to address this critical health care problem, which is a burden to patients, their families, and society. Together, the faculty, staff, and student members of CACPR bring together a unique collection of skills to create an exciting research environment that is primed to make great strides in the field of pain research.
“It was a great honor to be named co-director,” Renn said. “My predecessors built a strong foundation to make CACPR into the outstanding center that it is. I have big shoes to fill, and it is a great privilege to have the opportunity to try to fill them.”
Renn succeeds Susan G. Dorsey, PhD ’01, MS ’98, RN, FAAN, professor at UMSON, and Chung succeeded the late Joel D. Greenspan, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Neural and Pain Sciences at UMSOD.