Congratulations Fiona!

Professor Fiona Blyth has received a Member of the Order of Australia award for significant service to medical research and education in the fields of public health, pain management and ageing, and to health policy reform – a fabulous personal achievement as well as an acknowledgement of the valuable contribution of pain researchers in Australia.

Fiona Blyth (BSc (Med), MBBS (Hons), MPH, PhD, FAFPHM) is a Professor of Public Health and Pain Medicine at the University of Sydney. A public health physician, pain epidemiologist and medical educator, she is currently Head of the University of Sydney Concord Clinical School at Repatriation General Concord Hospital and Associate Dean within the Faculty of Medicine.

Internationally recognised for her conceptual and empirical work in characterising the burden of chronic pain conditions within populations, Fiona has been involved in studies of chronic disease epidemiology (with a specific interest in pain-related conditions) for more than 15 years. This includes large prospective cohort studies, RCTs, pharmacoepidemiological studies, and health services research using linked routinely collected datasets.

Fiona was on the expert reference group for low back pain for the World Health Organization’s 2010 Global Burden of Disease Project. She has strong links with local and international groups researching healthy ageing, arthritis/musculoskeletal conditions, and injury. She has a particular interest in multi-morbidity of chronic conditions, and has co-authored a book chapter on this topic related to pain and multimorbidity.

In the past five years she was also Head of Intramural Research at the Sax Institute – a national and international leader in research on healthy ageing, health services research, fostering collaborative research and translation of research into health policy. She is currently the Senior Advisor in the Knowledge Exchange Division, where she is involved with knowledge brokering and training knowledge brokers.