Adam Hirsh

Adam is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Indiana University Indianapolis (IUI) and Director of the IUI Pain Research Laboratory. Adam received his PhD in Clinical & Health Psychology from the University of Florida and completed postdoctoral training in Rehabilitation Research at the University of Washington School of Medicine. His laboratory is broadly interested in the biopsychosocial aspects of pain and functioning in humans across the developmental spectrum. They study how individual-level factors (e.g., biology, cognition, emotions) interact with interpersonal and socio-contextual factors (e.g., cultural heritage, social class, relationship status) to influence the experience of and judgments about pain. To this end, they study providers of pain care, patients who experience pain and their family members, and healthy laypersons. They incorporate a diverse array of within- and between-subjects research designs, ranging from epidemiologic to observational to interventional. Their research methods are also diverse and include computer-simulated virtual human technology, laboratory-based quantitative sensory testing, qualitative methods, and clinical data capture. The IUI Pain Research Laboratory is interdisciplinary and highly collaborative, working with national and international colleagues in medicine, health services, communication science, informatics, and computer science. Adam has been collaborating with Dr. Vervoort’s team since 2016. They have conducted innovative, cross-cultural laboratory and clinical studies on pain-related injustice in youth, on the interplay between youth and caregiver appraisals of pain and functioning and racial disparities in child pain care.