Contact Information
Education
Postdoctoral fellowship, Indiana University
PhD, University of Michigan
Predoctoral fellowship, University of Michigan
BSN, University of Michigan
Research Areas
Quality of Life & Chronic Condition Management
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Barriers to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Educational Pedagogies
Coaching
Evaluation and Testing
Managing Chronic Conditions
Cardiovascular Nursing
Genetics
Pain Management
Quality of Life
Symptom Science
Managing Symptoms
Biography
Dr. Smith is an assistant professor at Indiana University School of Nursing. Dr. Smith received his BSN in 2016 and his PhD in 2020, both from the University of Michigan. His PhD was funded by a predoctoral fellowship from the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation. His dissertation conducted prospective modelling to identify modifiable predictors of sexual function in cardiac disease. His dissertation chair was Dr. Debra Barton. He also worked as an RN at the bedside during all four years of his PhD program on a general medicine unit at the University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers.
Dr. Smith completed a T32 postdoctoral fellowship funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research at Indiana University in June of 2022. His research focus is pain management in chronic heart failure. He has received grants from Sigma Theta Tau International and the Hillman Foundation to characterize pain using both emergency medical services data and through omics methodologies. His long-term research goals are to create novel pain self-management interventions for patients suffering from heart failure through a deep phenotyping approach to better understand the pathophysiology of pain mechanisms. A passionate advocate for quality nursing education, particularly PhD mentorship, he also received his Certificate in Nursing Education, and spearheaded development of a survey to quantify PhD mentorship quality, which is currently being tested across all PhD programs at the University of Michigan.
External Funding
2020-2022. "Phenotyping the Pain of Heart Failure: Characterization, Predictors, and Outcomes." (PI). Sigma Theta Tau International Alpha Chapter, $5,400.
2021-2023. "Do Differences in Gene Expression by mRNA Explain Pain Presence Among Patients with Heart Failure?" (PI). $4,379
Publications
Description of the video:
My name is Asa Smith. I'm an assistant professor at Indiana University School of Nursing. So, my first experiences with research was actually when I was a high school student. I first worked on a clinical trial just as a volunteer working with some of the data that they had. And it wasn't a big role, but it was enough to really spark my interest in research. And when I started my bachelor's, I really wanted to get going with research right away. And I started an undergraduate research opportunity. And it was a bench science role. So I was in a basic science laboratory. I was working with mice and viruses. It really taught me how to conduct research, but I knew I wanted to do something that was a bit more related to nursing. So after I got my BSN, I went right into a PhD. As a researcher, my goal is to unlock some challenging questions that we as nurses face. And my area of research is in pain. And it comes from my clinical practice. I remember, you know, we had so many patients who had all these different pain medications that they had already taken and yet they were still experiencing this breakthrough pain. And we had to be very creative about how to manage pain. We had to use different positioning. We had to use heat or cold or mobility. And I thought there has to be a better way than what we're doing. My clinical population is heart failure. I wanted to study heart failure because when we think of the heart, we think of chest pain as sort of all there is to it. But we know that people with heart failure, they experience a lot more than just chest pain. And yet, there aren't really any strong treatment guidelines or policies on how to manage pain that is a chest pain. And that's sort of what I hope will be the longterm goals, the long-term objective of my work. Um, and I think that's exciting to think about those possibilities. I think IU School of Nursing is a fantastic place to come as a posttock and as a faculty. When I come to work, I can see the excitement and just the tenor of the work that we do here. It's really unlike anything that I've ever seen before. Everybody's really engaged with each other. We love collaborating with each other. Um giving each other uh feedback on our work that builds us up rather than breaks us down. I just really think we support each other and we look out for one another.