Staja “Star” Booker is an Associate Professor in the College of Nursing and a 2026 UF Research Foundation Professor — a nurse scientist whose work addresses a question that sounds administrative and is anything but: how does pain research actually reach the people it is supposed to serve?
A great deal of pain research is conducted on populations that do not resemble the populations living with the most pain. Interventions get designed in academic centers, tested on whoever is easiest to recruit, and then delivered to communities that had no hand in shaping them — and that frequently have well-earned reasons for distrust.
Booker’s research takes that problem as the subject rather than a limitation to note in a discussion section.
She is principal investigator of PROACTIVE, the PROACTIVE Study for Black Elders (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06512727), currently recruiting at UF. The study centers older Black adults — a group carrying substantial pain burden and historically underrepresented in the research meant to address it.
A 2025 paper in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, which she led, sets out how PROACTIVE was actually built. Four mixed-methods studies of adults aged 50 to 94 examined how older Black adults perceive, manage, and cope with osteoarthritis and joint pain, with a community advisory board and subject matter experts brought in at different stages of each one. What came out of that is an intervention combining culturally congruent pain education, spiritual coping, and financial navigation — three components nobody arrives at by adapting an existing program from a distance.
Booker also appeared on the PRICE of Pain podcast in Episode 3, discussing research communication — which, given the rest of her work, is not a side interest. It is the same problem approached from another direction.
We asked her what community-engaged pain research requires that conventional trials do not.
Community-engaged research requires the 4 P’s: passion, presence, product, & problem-solving. I like to think of community-engaged research as being ‘engaged or married’ to the community — accepting its people and helping solve its most pressing health problems.
Staja “Star” Booker, PhD, RN, FAAN
What we study:
- Pain and Aging
- Chronic Pain Risk Factors
- Pain and the Brain
- Musculoskeletal Pain
- Pain and Exercise
- Non-Medical Treatment of Pain
Prefer to talk to a person? Call 352-273-5967 or email PRICE-CTSI@ufl.edu.
UF Study ID IRB201400126
References
- The PROACTIVE Study for Black Elders. Principal Investigator: Staja Q. Booker, PhD, RN. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT06512727. Status: Recruiting. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06512727
- Booker SQ, Alzahid SK, Jackson S, et al. Using Multi-Method Insights to Develop a Novel Chronic Pain Self-Management Intervention for Black Older Adults. J Racial Ethn Health Disparities. 2025 Dec 22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-025-02805-y
- PRICE of Pain podcast archive, 22 episodes (2021-2022). https://price.ctsi.ufl.edu/price-of-pain-podcast/
- PRICE Research Registry recruitment materials, UF Study ID IRB201400126. IRB-approved; supplied by site owner. https://is.gd/PRICE