Susan G. Dorsey, PhD, RN, FAAN
Professor, Department of Organizational Systems and Adult Health, University of Maryland School of Nursing
Professor, Departments of Anesthesiology and Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Professor, Department of Neural and Pain Sciences, University of Maryland School of Dentistry
Susan Dorsey is nationally and internationally recognized for her research and scholarship studying chronic pain and cancer treatment-related symptoms.
She joined the University of Maryland School of Nursing (UMSON) in 2004 and served as founding chair of its Department of Pain and Translational Symptom Science from 2014 to 2022.
Dr. Dorsey also is founding co-director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) Center to Advance Chronic Pain Research (CACPR), which then-UMB President Jay A. Perman, MD, requested be formed in 2012. Dorsey assembled a leadership team and secured a National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) P30 Center grant. The mission of CACPR, the first non-school-based, Universitywide research center at UMB, is to cultivate and expand cutting-edge multidisciplinary pain research with a team of nationally and internationally renowned clinical and preclinical transitional scientists. Dorsey stepped down as co-director in 2022.
Dorsey’s work has led to new discoveries in the characterization and validation of biomarkers of the transition from acute to chronic pain across numerous conditions. She is collaborating with interdisciplinary colleagues in the schools of medicine and pharmacy on early drug discovery efforts for a novel, non-opioid therapeutic target that she and her team identified as having a critical role in the formation of persistent pain, the BDNF receptor trB.T1. Other studies include identification of new non-addictive therapeutic targets to better manage pain in both preclinical and clinical models using multiomics methods.
She has a deep commitment to teaching and mentoring the next generation of scientists.
Dorsey’s research has been consistently funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving more than $30 million as principal investigator or multiple-principal investigator. Currently, she has over $9 million in NIH funding through four active grants and an NIH contract.
Dorsey has a significant record of publication in journals including Pain, PLOS Genetics, Journal of Neuroscience, Nursing Research, and Science Signaling. She is the co-editor of the 2020 book “Genomics of Pain and Co-Morbid Symptoms.”
Dorsey has been recognized by her peers with her induction as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (2011) and the prestigious Friends of the NINR Welch/Woerner Path-Paver Award (2019) for mentorship. In 2015, she was inducted into the Sigma Theta Tau International Researcher Hall of Fame for the International Honor Society of Nursing.
She earned her PhD and MS from UMSON and her undergraduate degree from West Virginia Wesleyan College.
