Penn Nursing’s Peggy Compton, the van Ameringen Chair in Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing and associate professor in the department of family and community health, was selected for induction to the International Nurse Research Hall of Fame. She will be honored by Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI) during the 31st International Nursing Research Congress, July 23-27, now being held virtually.

Dr. Compton’s work is grounded in her neuropsychiatric nursing practice in addiction and pain treatment settings and involves the testing and refinement of a novel nursing theory that pain and opioid addiction are interrelated phenomena co-expressed in unique human life responses. Dr. Compton has established herself as an expert in identifying opioid abuse and addiction in chronic pain patients, opioid-induced hyperalgesia in patients on chronic opioid therapy and has made significant contributions to the fields of addiction and pain.

Dr. Compton’s experience working in several public treatment settings, coupled with her extensive research and publication on pain and opioids, has helped to establish methods to detect alterations in pain responses in patients on opioid therapy and identify substance use disorders and addiction in chronic pain patients on ongoing analgesic therapy. Determining whether patients are taking their opioid medications appropriately, and aggressively treating addiction should it present, are critical to effective pain care, but often challenging for the primary care clinician. Dr. Compton has been instrumental in developing tools that utilize foundational assessment categories such as family/personal history of addiction, psychiatric disorders and opioid use patterns, to assess for the presence of substance use disorders.