News
October 2, 2021

Professor LeBaron Named an Academy Fellow

Christine Kueter
Professor Virginia LeBaron
LeBaron, who studies cancer pain and novel approaches to pain relief, brings the School's number of national academies fellows to 50 and its FAANs to 33.

Professor Virginia LeBaron—a palliative care nurse practitioner, Fulbright scholar alumna, multi-million-dollar NIH/NINR grantee, and a recently published poet—was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing at a Washington, D.C. ceremony in October.

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with LeBaron's induction, the School's national academies fellows count is up to 50, and its number of FAANs totals 33

LeBaron—who is already a Fellow of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners—joined the nation’s more than 2,900 Academy Fellows who are leaders in education, management, practice, and research and engage to transform American healthcare systems. This most recent honor brings the School’s national academy fellowships count to 50, and its number of AAN Fellows to 33.

A 1995 graduate of UVA, LeBaron studied the geography of cancer pain, access to pain relief, and opioid abuse and diversion in Southwest Virginia, where cancer mortality is 23 percent higher than elsewhere in the state. In 2018, she earned a $350,000 National Institutes of Health grant to develop a novel app to detect and measure cancer pain in Nepal, where patients with late-stage cancer often suffer untreated pain due to a chronic shortage of morphine, the gold standard for treating pain from advanced cancer.

That same year, she began a pilot study with UVA engineering colleagues to develop wearable technology and environmental sensors to detect, manage, and predict pain from advanced cancer, work that she’s expanding upon thanks to a four-year, $3.4 million National Institutes of Health grant earned in 2021.

Professor Virginia LeBaron
LeBaron arrived at UVA in 2015 and began to study the twin issues plaguing Southwest Virginia and many other areas of the U.S.: untreated cancer pain and the misuse, abuse, and diversion of opioids.
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Nepalese oncologists working with prof. Virginia LeBaron to develop a pain app
With a NIH Fogarty grant, she developed a novel app now used by clinicians and patients with advanced cancer in Nepal, where untreated pain from cancer is high and access to pain relief sparse.
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University of Virginia School of Nursing
With colleagues John Lach (engineering, at left) and Leslie Blackhall (a palliative care MD), LeBaron developed and studied the use of pain monitoring devices for cancer patients to wear at home ...
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An image of the smart watches nurse scientist Virginia LeBaron will use to study cancer pain and its triggers
... work she is continuing with a four-year, $3.4M NIH grant that will refine the use and impact of wearable tech to actually predict and manage cancer pain in the home, where it's most often treated.
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LeBaron is also a published poet with the release in 2021 of Cardinal Marks, her first book. 

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