Denise D. Lester, MD, serves as Vice Chair of the American Society of Pain & Neuroscience’s Military Leadership Council. She is a pain medicine anesthesiologist who has practiced at the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, since 1996, where she directs the Peripheral Nerve Stimulation Implant Program and co-directs Interventional Pain Research at the Central Virginia VA Health Care System. She also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine and has taught in VCU’s Pain Fellowship program since the late 1990s.
Dr. Lester earned her medical degree from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and completed an internal medicine internship at Monmouth Medical Center before training in anesthesiology at Thomas Jefferson University’s Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia, where she also completed pain management and addiction medicine training. She is board certified by the American Board of Anesthesiology, the American Board of Pain Medicine, and the American Board of Preventive Medicine (Addiction Medicine), and holds Fellow status with the American Society of Addiction Medicine (FASAM).
Her clinical and research focus centers on pain in military service members and veterans, particularly post-amputation and phantom limb pain, spinal cord stimulation, peripheral nerve stimulation, intrathecal drug delivery, and minimally invasive spinal procedures. She has served as a primary investigator on multi-site trials evaluating percutaneous peripheral nerve stimulation for post-amputation pain and was a primary author of the National VHA/DoD Clinical Practice Guidelines on upper extremity amputation pain. Dr. Lester has presented her research at national meetings including ASPN’s annual conference and the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine.