Madelon Peters is professor of experimental health psychology at Maastricht University, the Netherland. Here research focuses on the influence of psychological risk and resilience factors for pain chronification and pain disability. She combines experimental research in healthy volunteers to elucidate mechanism of pain chronification with observational studies and randomized controlled trials in people affected by chronic pain. In her experimental work she studied among others how optimism reduces the interfering effects of pain. For her clinical research, she developed and tested the efficacy of a positive psychology intervention to increase wellbeing in patients with chronic pain. Her current work is largely on post-surgical pain. She performed several prospective studies on predictors of persistent pain after surgery. She also leads two multicenter trials on the efficacy of peri-operative cognitive behavioral therapy to reduce the risk of chronic post-surgical pain in patients undergoing breast cancer surgery or spinal 

 fusion surgery. Her main motivation is understanding what drives pain chronification and finding ways to alleviate the suffering of patients.