Magdalena Anitescu, MD, PhD, associate professor of anesthesia and critical care, is the program director for the multidisciplinary pain medicine fellowship and the section chief of pain management services at the University of Chicago Medicine. She completed a surgical internship at the University of Iowa and an anesthesia residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Following a pain medicine fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic, she joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. She is an accomplished national and international educator, author of numerous textbook chapters and scientific papers, and a member of many professional organizations and scientific committees that review the academic curriculum for various pain medicine meetings.

As program director of pain medicine at the  University of Chicago, Dr. Anitescu created novel educational experiences for the curriculum by organizing and hosting interdisciplinary and multi-institutional meetings.  Among them are the annual  Chicago Pain Summit,  the bi-annual Regional Collaborative Case Conference, and multi-disciplinary rounds.  The aim is to give pain fellows access to the practices at other institutions, to exchange ideas, or to present scholarly work or clinically challenging cases.

She is the President-Elect for Anesthesiologists Subspecialty Program Directors in the US Association of Academic Anesthesiologists.  As a treasurer of the Association of Pain Medicine program directors, Dr. Anitescu’s efforts were directed to the pain medicine match and to the development of educational materials for pain fellows nationwide. Dr. Anitescu focuses research on improving the quality of life of patients with acute, chronic, or cancer pain through multi-modal, multi-faceted interventions. 

Her research focuses on improving treatment outcomes in patients suffering from cancer pain as well as efficacy of interventional pain procedures and multimodal analgesic regimen in improving functional status and survivorship in cancer pain patients; use of implantable devices (spinal cord stimulators) as well as ketamine infusions in chronic nonmalignant pain is also a topic where dr Anitescu has significant scholarly published contributions.