Meet some of the speakers for the 2023 PainAdelaide conference, Monday 30 October at the National Wine Center Adelaide… possibly the best little pain meeting in the world….
Dr Bronwyn Lennox Thompson
Bronwyn Lennox Thompson initially trained as an occupational therapist, graduating 1984. She later completed her MSc with first class honours in Psychology in 1999 at Canterbury University, and in 2015 was awarded her PhD from the Department of Health Sciences at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
She has worked in pain management for most of her clinical career, with her primary focus on pain management at work. Since 2002 she has taught postgraduate papers in pain and pain management at University Otago. She is now Academic Coordinator and Senior Lecturer, responsible for postgraduate programmes in pain and pain management in Orthopaedic Surgery & Musculoskeletal Medicine, University of Otago, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Her main research and teaching areas include resilience, daily coping choices, and knowledge translation from research to clinic.
Professor Nancy Baker
Dr. Nancy Baker is a professor at Tufts University Department of Occupational Therapy. Before she obtained her doctoral degree in Therapeutic Studies from Boston University in 2000, she was a clinical occupational therapist specializing in treating people with musculoskeletal disorders. From 2001 to 2018 she was a faculty member in the Department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Baker is an internationally recognized leader in the field of pain, arthritis, work disability and function. Her current research focuses on developing virtual reality as a method to treat chronic pain and on ergonomic modifications to prevent work related injuries and has received foundation and federal funding in these areas. She has published extensively in multidisciplinary journals and presented at over 300 conferences.
Dr. Baker has helped shape the national strategies for treating musculoskeletal disorders and is the “go to” occupational therapy expert on current research and practices in arthritis. She was a Guest Researcher at the CDC Division of Population Health: Arthritis, Epilepsy, and Well-Being Branch in 2015, has helped develop national guidelines for treatment of arthritis for the American College of Rheumatology, and has been invited to develop guidelines for the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA). Dr Baker has been an associate editor on both primary US occupational therapy research journals and is currently an associate editor for the rheumatology journal, Arthritis Care and Research. She was an executive board member for the American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF), which supports occupational therapy research, from 2018 to 2021 and is currently the Chair of the Scientific Review Groups for all AOTF sponsored research grants. In 2012 she was elected to the AOTF Academy of Research, the highest research honor of the profession and in 2017 she was elected as a Fellow in the AOTA Roster of Fellows.
Professor Ben Colagiuri
Ben Colagiuri is a Professor and Head of School in the School of Psychology, University of Sydney. His research explores how expectancies influence human behaviour, with a specific interest in placebo and nocebo effects. To date, he has developed a number of novel experimental models to uncover the mechanisms of placebo and nocebo effects for pain, sleep, nausea, and related conditions. He has been awarded more than $5.5 million in competitive research funding, including multiple Australian Research Council Discovery Grants, published over 100 scientific papers, and received national and international recognition for his research. His current research is exploring how knowledge about placebo and nocebo effects could be used ethically to improve patient outcomes.
Professor Christine Lin
Prof Christine Lin is an NHMRC Emerging Leadership 2 Fellow and a Professorial Research Fellow at The University of Sydney, Sydney Musculoskeletal Health. Her research focuses on investigating the benefits and harms of treatments for musculoskeletal conditions. She also leads research to investigate ways to reduce the use of pain medicines, such as opioids, for non-cancer pain.
Prof Lin has a particular interest in the pharmacological management of back pain. Her research has shown that some common medicines are not effective and may cause more harms in people with back pain, leading to changes in clinical guidelines and practice. Her research has been published in high impact journals including N Engl J Med, The Lancet, JAMA and BMJ.
Professor Elaine Fox
Elaine Fox is Professor of Psychology and Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Adelaide. A leader in research on the role of cognitive mechanisms in mental health across the lifespan, Professor Fox’s work focuses on the nature of human emotions and why people respond differently to adversity and success.
Professor Fox is interested in the nature of human emotions and why people differ so much from each other in how they react to similar environmental situations. A current research focus of hers is cognitive and affective flexibility and how these fundamental mechanisms affect psychological health and wellbeing.
Professor Mark Hutchinson
Professor Hutchinson is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP), a Professor within the School of Biomedicine at the University of Adelaide. Mark is also President of Science and Technology Australia, the peak body in Australia that represents 115,000 scientists. His other roles include chairing the Australian Pain Solutions Alliance steering committee, Chair for the Australian Defence Force’s Safeguarding Australia through Biotechnology Response and Engagement (SABRE) Alliance, a founding member of The Animal Welfare Collaborative executive committee, and a member of the Operating in Contaminated Environments Advisory Committee for the Defence Science Technology Group CBRN STaR Shot.
Associate Professor David Butler
David is a physiotherapist, an educationalist, researcher and clinician, now shifting into peaceful retirement. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of South Australia and honoured member of the Australian Physiotherapy Association. Among many publications, his recent texts, co-authored with Lorimer Moseley, include Explain Pain (2003, 2013), The Graded Motor Imagery Handbook (2012), The Explain Pain Handbook:Protectometer (2015), “Explain Pain Supercharged” (2017) and Epiphaknee: A modern approach to knee osteoarthritis. (2022). In semi-retirement, he goes fishing, appreciates red wine enthusiastically, catches and disposes of feral cats and still likes to write about pain.
**Picture drawn by David’s 10 year old grand niece for the Archibald**
Dr Dusan Matusica
Dusan is a Senior Lecturer in Anatomy & Histology and a Group Lead of the Pain & Sensory Cell Neurobiology Lab within the FHMRI, College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University. His research interests span molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating the neuronal function and signalling pathways involved in the development of central and peripheral neurons, as well as the dysregulation of these mechanisms in the pathophysiology of chronic pain. Dusan’s long-term goal is to develop biosensors to translate basic cellular and molecular biology research into candidate biomarkers and therapeutics to diagnose and treat chronic pain. Since 2019, his mission has been to engineer a novel nociceptor-based sensing technology for quantitative measurement and discrimination of multiple complex chronic pain conditions using neuronal imaging and transcriptomics.
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