Peggy Compton, RN, PhD is a Professor and the van Ameringen Endowed Chair in the Department of Family and Community Health at the Penn School of Nursing. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and a member of the International Association in the Study of Pain and the College on Problems of Drug Dependence. Her area of clinical expertise is the intersection of opioids, addiction, and pain, and her novel data has significantly contributed to literature on the phenomenon of opioid-induced hyperalgesia, and has informed guidelines for pain management in people on medication-assisted therapy. Her work establishing methods to identify substance use disorders in chronic pain patients on opioid analgesic therapy complements her expertise in the pain responses of people with opioid use disorders. She has published extensively in the scientific literature and she is an expert in the use of methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone in the treatment of opioid use disorder.
She has served on FDA, SAMHSA, and NIH expert panels on prescription opioid abuse, and has contributed to position statements from the American Pain Society, College on Problems of Drug Dependence, and the American Society of Pain Management Nursing on pain management for patients with addictive disease. She is principal investigator on an NIH study evaluating the effects of opioid taper on post-operative pain outcomes, and was recently inducted into the Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame by Sigma Theta Tau International in recognition for the impact of her work.
