Kathleen W. Meacham, MD, PhD

Bio

Kathleen W. Meacham, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pain Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where she is affiliated with Barnes-Jewish Hospital. She serves as Vice President of Translational Research for the American Society of Pain and Neuroscience (ASPN), reflecting a career built at the intersection of engineering, basic neuroscience, and clinical pain medicine.

Dr. Meacham earned a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, followed by a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering through the joint Georgia Institute of Technology/Emory University program and an M.D. from Emory University School of Medicine. She completed her anesthesiology residency through the Washington University/Barnes-Jewish Hospital/St. Louis Children’s Hospital Consortium, followed by pain medicine fellowship training at Washington University in St. Louis. She is board certified in anesthesiology by the American Board of Anesthesiology.

Her research program, developed under the mentorship of Robert W. Gereau IV, PhD, focuses on the mechanisms of neuromodulation for chronic pain control, including work identifying the neural structures activated by kilohertz-frequency spinal cord stimulation. Earlier in her training, she contributed to foundational work on multi-electrode array technology for spinal cord stimulation and, subsequently, on wireless and bio-integrated neuromodulation systems — bridging device engineering and translational pain neuroscience. She was named a recipient of the International Anesthesia Research Society’s Mentored Research Award (IMRA) in 2018, supporting a two-year focused research program on spinal cord stimulation mechanisms. She has also participated as faculty/course contributor at national neuromodulation education conferences, including Neuromodulation: The Science.