Hello, my name is Shirley Chen.

I am a Ph.D. student (enrolled in fall 2021) at the nursing college at the University of Iowa, with research focusing on chronic pain management in the aging population.

My interest in this topic started when I watched my mother suffer from the effects of postherpetic neuralgia (PHN). This chronic painful sequela can occur after shingles, lasting several months to several years. My research program will focus on the epidemiology of Shingles and PHN and the vaccination policy for Shingles. Now, my research focuses on understanding the barriers and facilitators of taking the shingles vaccine in the applicable population in the U.S. to guide interventions to improve vaccination and reduce PHN in older adults.

I attended several critical pain management and gerontological research communities, such as Pain SIG, Pain Research Program, and Csomay. I have an M.S. in biology, which supports me in doing an excellent job on my R.A. appointment that requires me to have good animal experiment hands-on skills and other experimental techniques of Molecular Biology. My current R.A. appointment is helping the TENS unit research team recruit subjects and collect data for the survey to study the effect of reducing cravings, which is going well because of our excellent teamwork and communication skill.