Victoria S Menzies, PhD, RN, FAAN

TEACHING

Dr. Menzies has taught across undergraduate and graduate programs with a focus on undergraduate psychiatric mental health nursing, graduate psychiatric mental health nursing, and doctoral level nursing theory.

RESEARCH

Dr. Menzies is a PhD prepared nurse researcher and educator. Her broad clinical training as a psychiatric clinical nurse specialist and her doctoral training in research methods have provided an ideal foundation for examining the biobehavioral factors in human health and disease. Her program of research has focused on improved symptom self-management in individuals diagnosed with chronic pain conditions. Dr. Menzies has spent several years caring for patients whose chronic pain was associated with or exacerbated by mental health conditions and for whom receiving optimal healthcare was challenging because of the context in which they lived, worked, and played (i.e., social determinants of health [SDOH]). Subsequently, the focus of her program of research over the last two decades has been improving symptom self-management in individuals diagnosed with the chronic pain condition of fibromyalgia (FMS). She has worked to achieve this goal both through the development and testing of nonpharmacologic strategies to manage the symptom of perceived pain and by examining relationships among the biobehavioral variables of pain, fatigue, distressed mood, and immunological measures. Recently, as in a secondary analysis of data from an earlier intervention study, she has shifted her research focus to identifying individual characteristics and SDOH that increase risk for chronic pain, with the long-term goal of designing interventions that mitigate chronic pain in high-risk individuals.

SERVICE

Dr. Menzies is an active member of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR)/Association of Rheumatology Professionals (ARP)and has served on the ACR Government Affairs Committee (2016-2019), the ARP Executive Committee (2018-2019), and ACR’s RheumPac Committee (2019-2022). Her other service activities for ACR/ARP have included serving as a member of (a) the lead abstract viewer contingent for ACR Convergence presentations, (b) the Portfolio Review Panel for the Rheumatology Research Foundation, and (c) the Voting Panel in the development and publication of the Integrative Rheumatoid Arthritis Treatment Guidelines. Dr. Menzies also serves as a member of the Southern Nursing Research Society’s Nomination and Succession Planning Committee (2023-2025).

Dr. Menzies area of expertise is nonpharmacological interventions and symptom management in fibromyalgia and other non-malignant chronic pain syndromes with expertise in examining underlying biological mechanisms. Recently she has shifted her research focus to identifying individual characteristics and social determinants of health that increase risk for chronic pain, with the long-term goal of designing interventions that mitigate chronic pain in high-risk individuals.

• Health disparities and Social determinants of health
• Symptom science; Chronic illness; Mind-Body therapies; Metabolomics

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