Dr. Lisa Taylor-Swanson is an Assistant Professor in the College of Nursing at University of Utah. Her research focuses on the improvement of chronic pain with an emphasis on midlife women’s health, gender disparities of the opioid epidemic, and the evaluation of traditional East Asian medicine interventions (including acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and moxibustion). She is particularly interested in the role of interoceptive awareness (IA) and emotion regulation (ER) in pain cognition. Dr. Taylor-Swanson is developing and testing a refined acupuncture intervention to improve IA and ER and thereby improve pain cognition, resulting in decreased pain severity and interference.

Dr. Taylor-Swanson previously provided acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine in private practice for over 17 years with an emphasis on women’s health and the treatment of male- and female-factor infertility.

Dr. Taylor-Swanson is an avid flamenco dancer and enjoys world music, yoga, hiking, swimming, and skiing.

Dr. Taylor-Swanson is  interested in interoceptive awareness (IA), defined as how we perceive our body. She studies  IA in two contexts: 1) the role of IA in symptom perception and evaluation and 2) as a mechanism of action of acupuncture. As a feminist clinician-scientist, Dr. Taylor-Swanson focuses these two lines of inquiry in the context of midlife women who take prescribed opioids for chronic pain. She evaluates acupuncture as an alternative to opioid medications because of her longstanding practice of traditional East Asian medicine.