RESEARCHER PROFILE
Associate Professor Tasha Stanton, (Filmed May 2024)
Associate Professor of Clinical Pain Neuroscience
SAHMRI (South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute) & University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia
Associate Professor Tasha Stanton leads the Persistent Pain Research Group at SAHMRI. She is also co-Director of IIMPACT in Health at the University of South Australia, Adelaide. She is a clinical pain neuroscientist, with original training as a physiotherapist, and her research focusses on pain – why do we have it and why doesn’t it go away? She has received over $7.3m in competitive research funding, including fellowships from the Canadian Institute for Health Research and the National Health & Medical Research Council (Early Career Fellowship, Career Development Fellowship), has published >110 peer-reviewed journal articles, and she has been a keynote/invited speaker at >100 national and international conferences. Her research has won both national and international awards, including the World Congress of Pain Ronald Dubner Research Prize, the Australian Pain Society Rising Star Award and the Australian Physiotherapy Association Best New Investigator Award.
Her research explores the sensory and cognitive contributors to pain and spans discovery to clinical implementation. That is, her work aims to better understand how the experience of pain is created and to use this knowledge to develop and test novel brain-based treatments for pain. She investigates the sensory contributors (and neural underpinnings) of pain in a unique way – by manipulating our sense of reality. Using mediated and virtual reality, her work explores the contribution of multisensory input to the experience of pain and to the experiences of (and engagement in) effortful treatments such as exercise. She is also interested in the role that pain science education – specifically shifting how an individual conceptualises and understands pain – plays in recovery from chronic pain, with a focus on knee osteoarthritis. She has authored a book (EPIPHAKNEE) that provides contemporary pain science knowledge about osteoarthritis and its treatment for both people with osteoarthritis and their treating clinicians.
Tasha holds active roles in knowledge dissemination, science communication, and media engagement. She was recognised as one of Australia’s Top 5 under 40 Science Communicators (ABC Radio National and UNSW) and was the SA Tall Poppy of the Year in 2015. She is the founder of the Brain Bus – a mobile experiential lab that promotes knowledge transfer via real-world experiences. Through Pain Revolution (educational tour) – The Brain Bus has reached >5k people in rural and regional Australia. She has been featured on ABC’s Weekender, All in the Mind, Health Report, Catalyst, and Conversations with Sarah Kanowski.
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Good and bad extracellular vesicles in health and disease
Associate Professor Joy Wolfram has joint appointments in the School of Chemical Engineering and the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at The University of Queensland, and through her work at the AIBN, she aims to develop a new paradigm of therapeutics (using nanotechnology and cell products) to treat life-threatening diseases that are major causes of death globally, including cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and breast cancer.
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Applying nanotechnology to chronic pain management
Dr Felicity Han is a Research Fellow and Leader in Pain Relief Innovation, at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in the University of Queensland. Dr Han’s research interests sit at the interface of drug delivery and the pain field. Her overarching research goal is to improve the quality of day to day life of patients suffering from chronic pain, by applying nanotechnology to the development of novel highly effective pain-killer products for improving chronic pain management.
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Food and fasting periods as medicine to prevent disease
Professor Leonie Heilbronn is based at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), where she leads the Obesity and Metabolism laboratory. Her research is at the interface between basic and clinical science. She is internationally recognised for her work in nutritional modulation in humans and has made major contributions to our current understanding of mechanisms underlying conditions such as insulin resistance, particularly inflammation and lipid metabolism. She has also contributed significantly to current concepts of caloric restriction (CR), intermittent fasting (IF) and time restricted eating (TRE) in humans. She has published more than 110 peer reviewed papers in scientific journals and is an Associate Editor of Obesity, and Obesity Research and Clinical Practice.
