It’s that time of year again. Up here on the top of the world in Australia, we are getting ready for a month of sand, surf, BBQ’s and belly laughs – the whole country goes on holidays for a few weeks. So, it is a great time to look back on 2012 and look forward to 2013. Here are some highlights and a brief peek into the looking glass for next year:
I remain absolutely chuffed to be working with such a superb group of clever, community-minded, energetic, hard working and kind people. At a small end of year dinner the other night, I think Emily might have thought I had downed a few too many Sauvignon Blancs because my tiny and rushed speech did sound a little like ‘I love yers all’. Sadly, we have farewelled Hayley off to Africa with her first class honours degree in hand and Dr Ann Meulders will return to Belgium soon, sun tan, and Lars, intact. Happily, next year we will be joined by 4 new post-docs, 5 new PhD students and 2 new honours students; visiting researchers from Italy, the UK and Iran, and a smattering of some of my favourite international superstars for the Inaugural PainAdelaide meeting. We have just said goodbye to Giando Iannetti and Martin Lotze – we are so very grateful for their time and wisdom – they are both men of unexampled generosity and collaborative spirit!
We have had a reasonably productive year here – we have published 25 journal articles, several other articles for magazines or newspapers, and 100 blog posts. We have delivered 45 conference presentations – the conference highlights being the NOI2012 Festival and the World Congress on Pain in Milan. Tasha Stanton, Carolyn Berryman, Flavia Di Pietro, Luke Parkitny and Laura Gallagher have received invitations to speak. Mark Catley and Carolyn, Flavia and Tasha won travel scholarships. Tasha won a prestigious Fellowship with the NHMRC and Sarah and Jane won PhD scholarships. We won two project grants worth a total of $1.3 million. We won the Marshal & Warren Prize for Best Innovative and Potentially Transformative Project, out of 3800 submissions.
BodyinMind.org now receives about 15,000 unique visitors a month, has almost 4,000 followers each on Facebook and Twitter and has a Klout score (a measure of internet and social media influence) of 54, which makes us clearly the most influential pain site on the planet. We have had posts from 46 writers from 9 countries. We have captured the attention of the decision makers at the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, funding agencies on three continents, and the health departments of several countries.
Collectively we rode 920km for Pain, Dan recorded a CD, Lorimer wore a dress, Laura and Audrey had a baby, each, Tasha (along with the other ICECReamers) won the John Chalmers award for Innovation for their early career website. Flavia ran two triathlons, Luke brewed beer. Heidi became an Australian and attended a posh ceremony at Sydney town hall, Tasha learned to be an illusionist, Tracy applied for her own job and blitzed the field in a bizarre restructuring anxiety test from the number crunches in HR, and Simon’s stick figures went viral. Caitlin made a brave move here from Melbourne this year, taking on the mammoth effort of recruiting and following up participants for the large CRPS study and Eva confessed to moving in with Ryan 3 weeks after they met.
About Lorimer Moseley
Lorimer is NHMRC Senior Research Fellow with twenty years clinical experience working with people in pain. After spending some time as a Nuffield Medical Research Fellow at Oxford University he returned to Australia in 2009 to take up an NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA). In 2011, he was appointed Professor of Clinical Neurosciences & the Inaugural Chair in Physiotherapy at the University of South Australia, Adelaide. He runs the Body in Mind research groups. He is the only Clinical Scientist to have knocked over a water tank tower in Outback Australia.
Link to Lorimer’s published research here. Downloadable PDFs here.