People

Dr. Compton is an Associate Professor and the van Ameringen Endowed Chair in the
Department of Family and Community Health at the University of Pennsylvania School
of Nursing. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and an elected
member of the International Association in the Study of Pain, and the College on
Problems of Drug Dependence. Her area of clinical expertise is the intersection of
opioids, addiction and pain. The unifying theme of her program of research is the
understanding of pain responses in individuals who abuse or are addicted to opioids, licit
or otherwise, and her novel data have contributed to a growing body of literature on the
phenomenon of opioid-induced hyperalgesia, as well as informed guidelines for the
management of pain in persons with opioid addiction or on maintenance opioid therapy.
Complementing Dr. Compton’s expertise in the pain responses of opioid addicts is her
clinical work establishing methods to identify substance use disorders and addiction in
chronic pain patients on ongoing opioid analgesic therapy. She has published extensively
in the scientific literature on substance use disorder in chronic pain patients on opioid
therapy, and the pain responses of opioid addicts with and without chronic pain. Her role
as teacher, researcher, and mentor is strengthened by interdisciplinary research
collaborations with the NIDA Center for Studies of Addiction at the Perelman School of
Medicine, the Penn Pain Medicine Center in the Department of Anesthesiology at the
University of Pennsylvania Health Systems, and the University of Pennsylvania NIH
Center of Excellence in Pain Education (COEPE). Having worked in several public
treatment settings, she is expert in the use of methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone in
the treatment of opioid use disorder. She has served on FDA, SAMHSA and NIH expert
panels on prescription opioid abuse, and contributed to position statements from the
American Pain Society, College on Problems of Drug Dependence, and the American
Society of Pain Management Nurses on pain management for patients with addictive
disease. She currently serves as principal investigator on a NIDA-supported grant
exploring hyperalgesic responses in individuals undergoing opioid taper.