Anna Kratz
University of Michigan, MI·Psychology·Early-career
Chronic pain, fatigue and foggy thinking are among the hardest symptoms to treat and the hardest to measure, partly because they rise and fall across a single day while clinic visits capture only one moment. Research here tackles both halves of that problem: measuring symptoms as people actually live with them, and developing mind-body and behavioral approaches to help people manage them.
- Fields
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
multiple sclerosis
chronic pain
cognitive dysfunction
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Test whether smartphone-delivered ambulatory cognitive tests and real-time self-reports detect two-year changes in cognitive function in multiple sclerosis more sensitively than conventional clinic-based snapshot assessments.
- Examine short-term (days) and long-term (years) associations between modifiable factors — physical activity measured by accelerometer, sleep, fatigue, pain, mood and stress — and changes in cognitive functioning in people with MS.
- Determine how cognitive functioning in daily life relates to social and physical functioning, using a measurement burst design with two-week intensive assessment periods repeated at baseline, one year and two years.
- Evaluate the effects of cannabinoids on sleep and pain in people with multiple sclerosis as part of the patient-oriented research training program.
- Develop and pilot test an acceptance-based eHealth program for chronic pain management in spinal cord injury, and develop relaxing and stimulating self-acupressure therapies for symptom management in MS while assessing their usability.
- Extend ambulatory research on momentary associations between pain and functioning to build just-in-time adaptive interventions that deliver mind-body and behavioral symptom self-management when needed.
More about the research
The work spans multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injury, and is paired with a program of mentoring clinician-scientists in patient-oriented research.
Why it matters
People with multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injury live with pain, fatigue and cognitive problems that current clinic assessments capture poorly. Smartphone-based cognitive testing and real-time symptom tracking could reveal what everyday factors — sleep, activity, mood — drive decline, guiding preventative, compensatory or restorative treatments. The complementary approaches under study, including self-acupressure, acceptance-based eHealth programs and timed self-management prompts, could offer non-drug options for hard-to-manage symptoms.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lindsey Potter
University of Utah, UT·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Examine how interacting demographic factors, such as income and sex, relate to real-time changes in stress, negative emotion, self-efficacy and tobacco use, using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) phone surveys.
Martin Sliwinski
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Psychology
Co-design more accessible versions of nine M2C2 smartphone cognitive tasks with community partners and compare them with the originals through A/B testing of 11,200 TestMyBrain.org users and burst assessments in 200 Einstein Aging Study participants.
Robert Miranda
Brown University, RI·Psychology·Early-career
Develop and collect pilot data on an integrated digital health platform built on gold-standard psychosocial interventions for treating alcohol use disorder among adolescents, aiming to widen access to evidence-based care.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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