Postdoctoral Research Fellow, MGH/HST Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging

I received my PhD in Nursing from the University of Pittsburgh in December 2019. My research trajectory is from bedside to bench. Initially in 2010, my research was rooted in medication adherence to endocrine therapy for breast cancer. After training in both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, I studied medication adherence using mixed methods among women with breast cancer at Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center in China. As my own and other research has shown that musculoskeletal pain is the primary reason for discontinuation of endocrine therapy in breast cancer, I focused on musculoskeletal pain with endocrine therapy for breast cancer in my doctoral dissertation, aiming to 1) gain an understanding of the inter-individual variability of musculoskeletal pain; and 2) identify clinical and genetic risk factors of musculoskeletal pain to better target a high-risk subpopulation. 

With the support of an F99/K00 award (the NCI Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition Award), I am very excited to join the Loggia Lab to expand my knowledge of pain research and build skills in MR-PET imaging. I look forward to adding a neuroimaging lens to my postdoctoral project, to gain a further understanding of the phenotype and biological mechanisms underlying the variability and chronicity of pain for cancer survivors.

Contact

Email: yzhu21@mgh.harvard.edu