Dr. Aleksandra Zgierska is a physician-scientist whose research, educational and advocacy work is rooted in her clinical practice. Board-certified in family medicine and addiction medicine, and with extensive experience in caring for adults with chronic pain, her studies have focused on improving health outcomes in addiction, pain and other impactful conditions, spanning diverse methodologies, including multi-center, mixed-methods randomized controlled trials, health services research, system-wide quality improvement initiatives, stakeholder engagement and community-based implementation projects.

Dr. Zgierska has studied mindfulness meditation-based interventions that suggested meditation as a promising therapy for addiction and opioid-treated chronic pain, leading to a current five-year multi-center randomized controlled trial assessing the effectiveness of meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy among adults with opioid-treated chronic low back pain.

Currently, she is developing protocols, as a part of a multi-center team, for increasing engagement in research among pregnant women who use drugs, laying the foundation for a future birth cohort study aimed at separating the impact on child development of in utero exposure to drugs, especially opioids, from that of adverse childhood experiences and other factors.

She leads the evaluation of a federally funded, citywide initiative that offers pre-arrest diversion from criminal justice to addiction treatment for adults who committed a minor drug-use-related crime.

Her research suggesting that the implementation of patient satisfaction ratings may unintentionally promote inappropriate opioid prescribing contributed to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decision to remove "pain questions" from the scoring formula used in the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program.

Dr. Zgierska is associate director for pain studies in Penn State Addiction Center for Translation and co-director of Penn State Health's pain and wellness program.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Zgierska received the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and Social Science Research Institute award to identify and address the impact of the pandemic on pregnant women and new mothers. Jointly with colleagues, she has been involved in several projects funded to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on patients and communities.

Dr. Aleksandra Zgierska has a special interest in pain management. She provides primary care to children and adults and specialty care to patients with chronic pain and addiction.

Board-certified in family medicine, American Board of Family Medicine

Board-certified in addiction medicine, American Board of Preventive Medicine/American Board of Addiction Medicine

Member, American Academy of Family Physicians

Member, American Academy of Pain Medicine

Member and Distinguished Fellow, American Society of Addiction Medicine

Member, North American Primary Care Research Group

Member, Physicians for Social Responsibility

Member, Institute for Computational and Data Sciences - Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Scientific Applications (CENSAI)