Keela Herr PhD, RN, FAAN Professor and Area Chair: Adult and Gerontology keela-herr@uiowa.edu 452 Nursing Building 319/335-7080

Dr. Keela Herr, PhD, RN, FAAN, is Professor and Chair of the Adult and Gerontological Nursing Area at the University of Iowa College of Nursing and Adjunct Associate Director, Department of Nursing Services and Patient Care, University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics in Iowa City. Dr. Herr also serves as the Research Initiative Director for the John A. Hartford Foundaton Center for Geriatric Nursing Excellence at the University of Iowa, focusing on initiatives to enhance the cadre of nurse faculty with active research programs that focus on improving the quality of life of senior citizens. She received her MSN degree in medical-surgical nursing in 1977 and her PhD in nursing from the University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing in 1986. She was employed at Northeast Missouri State University from 1977 until 1987 when she joined the faculty at the College of Nursing in Iowa City.

Dr. Herr has been engaged in a program of research and scholarly and professional activities for the past 15 years that has focused on the problem of pain in older adults. The primary focus of her work and expertise is in the area of pain assessment in older adults. She has conducted NIH-National Institute of Nursing Research -funded research to establish appropriate tools for evaluating pain intensity in this population and has extended that with a colleague to pain tool use in minority older adults. Recently, as Co-Principal Investigator on the Robert Wood Johnson funded project "Improving the Quality of End-of-Life Care in Iowa", Dr. Herr has provided leadership for a project that focuses on establishing Pain as a 5th Vital Sign in Iowa health care organizations as a step toward improving end of life care. Another current project is an AHRQ-funded research project, "Evidence-Based Practice: From Book to Bedside-Acute Pain Management in the Elderly", that is examining interventions to improve adoption of clinical practice guidelines in health care organizations with emphasis on the Management of Acute Pain in the Elderly. She has been principal or co-investigator of 14 research projects focused on the problem of geriatric pain and has numerous publications and presentations on the topic of geriatric pain. She is one author of Geriatrics at Your Fingertips, a handbook published annually and used by geriatric health care providers around the country and is an editor of a new guidebook, Improving the Lives of Older Adults with Persistent Pain: An Interdisciplinary Guide, published in 2002.

She is an active member of several professional organizations related to geriatric pain, including the American Society for Pain Management Nurses (ASPMN), the American Geriatric Society (AGS), the American Pain Society (APS) and the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). Dr. Herr currently serves on the editorial board for Advances in Gerontological Nursing, Clinical Journal of Pain, and Pain Medicine. She is a past Director for ASPUN and currently serves on the Board of Directors for APS. She served on the Task Force on Pain in the Elderly for the IASP, contributing to the first monograph addressing the problem of pain in older adults, and on expert panels of the AGS to develop clinical practice guidelines for chronic pain management in older adults and to establish a national research agenda for pain in older adults.