Speakers

Flis Bishop is a Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Southampton where she leads a programme of mixed methods research around complementary therapies and placebo effects in health care. Her interdisciplinary research has attracted funding from NIHR, Versus Arthritis, and others, and is published in medical, health psychology, and social science journals. 

With an extensive network of national and international collaborations, Flis has held visiting positions at Harvard and at the Australian Centre for Integrative and Complementary Medicine at UTS. Her current focus is on developing and testing novel and engaging ways to harness placebo effects in medical practice.

Samantha Cruz Rivera is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Patient Reported Outcomes Research (CPROR), University of Birmingham. She has experience in trials methodology, systematic reviews, qualitative research and patient and public involvement activities. 

Her primary research interests are maximising research impact, EDI, AI and outcomes research including methods to optimise patient reported outcome assessment in clinical trials and routine practice.

Jane Quinlan studied medicine and trained in anaesthesia in London before moving to Oxford.  She is a consultant in anaesthesia and pain management at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and is an honorary senior clinical lecturer at the University of Oxford.  She is past secretary of the Acute Pain Special Interest Group (APSIG) for the International Association for the Study of Pain and past chair of APSIG of the British Pain Society.

Jane has an interest in prescribed opioid dependence and runs a clinic supporting pain patients to reduce high-dose opioids.  She also has an interest around the safe prescribing of opioids in postoperative pain to avoid the conversion to long-term use. She sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Pain, and is on the organising committee of the National Acute Pain Symposium.

Louise Sell is a consultant psychiatrist at Pennine Care, Greater Manchester. She has an extensive background working as an Addiction Psychiatrist and Service Director in Greater Manchester and Lancashire. She has undertaken research on the neural mechanisms underlying craving for opioids and has researched and written on aspects of service provision, particularly injectable opioid maintenance. She has taught on the treatment of opioid dependence on the British Association of Psychopharmacology certificate. Dr Sell graduated in medicine from Cambridge and London Universities and trained in psychiatry at Oxford and the Maudsley before moving to the Northwest. 

In addition to her clinical career she has worked as an Executive Medical Director and is currently a Non-Executive Director at Stockport NHS Foundation Trust. She is a Trustee of Early Break, a charity providing substance misuse and mental health treatment for young people. Dr Sell has contributed to Department of Health and Social Care / Public Health England guidelines on substance misuse and is currently Chair of the expert group writing UK Clinical guidelines for the treatment of alcohol use disorders. She has held several roles with the Royal College of Psychiatrists and is currently leading work to increase the availability of training in addiction psychiatry. Her most recent clinical role was in Bury Integrated Pain Service, working with a team of physiotherapists, mental health nurse, psychologists and anaesthetist to transform the assessment and management of persistent pain.

Rebeccah Slater is the Professor of Paediatric Neuroscience and Senior Wellcome Fellow at the University of Oxford. She is also a Professorial Fellow at St. John’s College. 

Her work focuses on understanding the mechanisms that underlie the development of human pain perception, where she uses non-invasive brain imaging tools to explore the development of pain perception in the human nervous system. A focus of Rebeccah’s work is to provide a better mechanistic understand of whether parental touch can provide comfort and pain relief in infants. She designs and develops clinical trials that aim to assess the analgesic efficacy of pain relieving interventions.

Stephanie Tierney is a senior researcher at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences whose research interests include long-term conditions, delivery of services and patients' experiences of care. 

She is leading a programme of research focused on social prescribing as a means of supporting people with issues that cannot be treated with medication or medical procedures (e.g. loneliness, financial worries, housing problems). This research includes exploring the introduction of link workers into primary care and investigating how cultural providers and creative activities can be a means of sustaining people's well-being as part of social prescribing.

Irene Tracey is currently Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, her alma mater. She is also Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. 

Over the past 25 years her multidisciplinary research team has contributed to a better understanding of pain perception, pain relief and nociceptive processing within the injured and non-injured human central nervous system using advanced neuroimaging techniques and novel paradigm designs.

Irene has served and continues to serve on many national and international committees, such as the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), British Neuroscience Association and Lundbeck Brain Prize Committee. She is currently appointed by the Government to the Council of the Medical Research Council and is President-elect of the Federation of European Societies (FENS). She is a passionate advocate for women in science and is involved in several mentorship schemes. In 2008 she was awarded the triennial Patrick Wall Medal from the Royal College of Anaesthetists and in 2009 was made an FRCA for her contributions to the discipline. In 2015 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and in 2017 won the Feldberg Foundation Prize followed in 2018 by the British Neuroscience Association’s Outstanding Contribution to Neuroscience award and in 2020 she was elected a Member of the Academia Europaea. In the New Year’s Honours list 2022, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Her Majesty The Queen for services to Medical Research. 

Jackie Walumbe is an advanced practice physiotherapist at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Jackie works with multidisciplinary teams and is involved in the management of complex pain across specialities. She is an independent prescriber and clinical researcher. 

Jackie completed her DPhil (PhD) in Primary Health Care at the Nuffield Department of Primary Health Care Sciences, University of Oxford as part of a NIHR/HEE funded Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship in 2022. Her research focused on understanding how self-management is understood and enacted by people living with chronic pain, and how they are supported in policy and practice using mixed qualitative methods. Jackie is a Topol Digital Health Fellow alumnus (Cohort 3) where she explored digitally enabled solutions to support people living with chronic pain. Her current research interests are in applied  critical scholarship in rehabilitation with a health equity focus.