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    Denise D. Lester, MD, FASAM (she/her/hers)

    Anesthesiologist Pain Physician
    Richmond VA Medical Center
    Richmond, Virginia, United States

    Dr. Denise Lester is certified in Anesthesiology, Pain, and Addiction Medicine. She earned her medical degree from the New Jersey School of Medicine and completed subspecialty training at Thomas Jefferson University. She is an Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Virginia Commonwealth University and serves as Director of the Peripheral Nerve Stimulation (PNS) Implant Program and Co-Director of Interventional Pain Research at the Central Virginia VA Health Care System.
    For more than 20 years, she has been a lead educator for the VCU Pain Fellowship, receiving multiple teaching awards. A national leader in PNS, she helped expand the VHA’s program and has established clinical services for three of the five FDA-approved PNS devices, performing hundreds of implants for veterans.
    She is Vice Chair of the IRB, an Alternate Chair of the R&D Committee, and a Board Member of the McGuire Research Institute. She serves as Primary Investigator on multiple PNS trials, including national multicenter studies, and most recently co-authored the ASPN NEURON PNS Consensus Guidelines and the largest randomized controlled PNS trial published to date - the RESET trial 2025 .

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