Professor Sylvia Gustin

Professor Sylvia Gustin (PhD, BPsych, MPsych) is Director of the NeuroRecovery Research Hub (https://www.neurorecoveryresearch.com) at the University of New South Wales and Founding Director of the Centre for Pain IMPACT (*investigating pain mechanisms to advance clinical translation; https://www.neura.edu.au/research-centre/impact-pain-research) at Neuroscience Research Australia. Sylvia has been using multimodal neuroimaging techniques (e.g., functional, structural and biochemical magnetic resonance imaging) and psychological assessment to investigate the central circuits underlying chronic pain and spinal cord injury rehabilitation. Sylvia is an AHPRA registered psychologist and is a trained clinical psychologist in chronic pain and mental health disorders, e.g., anxiety and depressive disorders.

Her program of research forms a translational pipeline where her basic science research informs the development of novel therapeutic interventions that are translated to improve the lives of people with a disorder affecting the brain and spine. She develops and tests new technology treatments (e.g., Virtual Reality Walking and gamified Brain-Computer Interface Neuromodulation) to ameliorate neuropathic pain after spinal cord injury, phantom pain, complex regional pain syndrome and chronic orofacial pain. Her research also focuses on developing and testing novel haptic virtual reality walking treatments/interfaces to offer restoration of somatosensory perception among individuals with spinal cord injury who have been previously classified as having total sensorimotor loss.

Sylvia is the Rebecca Cooper Senior Medical Research Fellow and her research is funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), Rebecca L. Cooper Medical Research Foundation, International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), US Department of Defence (DoD), Wings for Life and NSW Defence Innovation Network and NSW Health.