Robert R. Edwards

Dr. Edwards is an Associate Professor of Anesthesia and a licensed clinical psychologist in the Pain Management Center at Brigham & Women’s Hospital - Harvard Medical School. He attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham, completing a Ph.D. in Medical Psychology and a Master’s in Public Health. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Pain Psychology at Johns Hopkins University before joining its psychiatry faculty. He moved to Brigham & Women’s Hospital in 2008. Dr. Edwards functions in a clinical capacity as a psychologist at the BWH Pain Management Center, where his responsibilities include assessment and treatment of chronic pain patients, which involves screening candidates for opioid therapy and implantable devices and offering behavioral medicine services such as biofeedback and cognitive-behavioral therapy. He also works as a mentor to junior faculty members in several research institutions, serves on the editorial boards of several pain and psychology journals, has leadership positions in the American Pain Society (APS) and the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), and has published numerous scientific articles, reviews, and book chapters on pain.

Dr. Edwards is also an NIH-funded clinical researcher whose work focuses on biobehavioral aspects of acute and chronic pain. Specifically, he studies individual differences in pain responses and the neurobiological mechanisms by which psychosocial processes shape those individual differences. Some of his current NIH-funded work focuses on the impact of pain-related catastrophizing on neuroendocrine and inflammatory responses to pain, as well as individual differences in central nervous system pain processing and their implications for long-term pain-related outcomes.

Dr. Edwards is presently involved in several post-operative pain studies that attempt to characterize risk and protective factors that influence the trajectory of long-term pain after surgery. He is also involved in several studies that use functional neuroimaging techniques to assess the neurobiology of pain-related thoughts and emotions. In addition, his research group is working in the area of predicting and preventing misuse of opioids by patients with persistent pain. Psychosocial processes such as catastrophizing and negative affect are strongly associated with opioid misuse, and cognitive-behavioral interventions appear to be effective in targeting these factors and enhancing compliance with recommended medication regimens. Finally, Dr. Edwards’ research group is conducting multiple randomized, controlled trials of non-pharmacologic treatments for patients with chronic pain.