Professor Lorimer Moseley is a physiotherapist and Australia’s top ranked chronic pain scientist. He leads the Body in Mind research group within UniSA’s Sansom Institute for Health Research and Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney. His research ultimately aims to reduce the incidence and burden of chronic pain.
Lorimer received a Bachelor of Physiotherapy, with Honours in Biomechanics, from the University of Sydney in 1992. He worked for several years as a clinical physiotherapist at the NSW Academy of Sport and then in pain management programs, before commencing his doctorate in the neurophysiology of pain, at the University of Sydney. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Queensland, he was appointed Nuffield Medical Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.
After returning to Australia in 2010 Lorimer was appointed Professor of Clinical Neurosciences and Chair in Physiotherapy at the University of South Australia. He is now an NHMRC Principal Research Fellow at UniSA, Senior Principal Research Fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia, and Chair of the PainAdelaide Stakeholders’ Consortium.
His seminal contributions to the field of pain science and treatment have generated new fields of research, treatments that are cited in evidence-based guidelines around the world, and concepts and terms that are now recognised internationally, for example ‘Explaining Pain’, ‘Graded Motor Imagery’ and the ‘Cortical Body Matrix’. The International Association for the Study of Pain awarded him the inaugural Ulf Lindblom Award for outstanding contribution to clinical pain sciences and his work on ‘The Imprecision Hypothesis’ won the Marshall & Warren Award from the National Health and Medical Research Council - Australia’s most prestigious project prize for innovation and potential transformation in health and medical research.
Lorimer has been recognised with awards from the pain society and physiotherapy associations of countries on every continent, including Honoured Member status of the Australian Physiotherapy Association, its highest honour, and ‘Friend of the Association’ from the American Physical Therapy Association. He is the only Australian to have delivered the opening plenary of the World Congress on Physiotherapy, the most prestigious lecture in the field internationally. He has given over 100 plenary talks in 28 countries, and authored over 180 articles and four books. He is Chief Editor of bodyinmind.org, the most influential web and social media presence in the clinical pain sciences internationally.
