Colleen has been a Nurse Practitioner for over 15 years, most of her career delivering care directly to traumatically injured adult patients. She has been interested in acute pain management in traumatically injured patients since she started her career. All her clinical nursing experience has involved caring for surgical and trauma patients. Pain is central to the care of these populations. Pain management continues to be challenging especially once acute pain becomes chronic pain. As part of her clinical practice, she became very interested in what mechanisms modulate the transformation from acute to chronic pain.  In her graduate studies she focused on nursing education related to acute pain management and the development of chronic pain in the traumatically injured patient. Her doctoral studies identified initial pain as a predictor of chronic pain after a traumatic injury. She wants to explore the relationship of biopsychosocial factors that modulate the pain experience how acute pain persists to the development chronic pain and to identify practices that may, ultimately prevent the development of chronic pain in traumatically injured patients.