Every movement we make with our bodies requires our brain to control our muscles to make those movements.  It also requires information to come back from the muscles, joint and skin to tell the brain what is going on.  This information forms a sense called ‘proprioception’.  Proprioception is why you still know where your arms and legs are when you close your eyes and it is why you can touch you nose with your eyes closed.  A lot is known about proprioception, but much more is not known and this is where my work comes in.  Learning more about proprioception will lead to new ways to help people with movement disorders, such as stroke patients.  It could also help us prevent some types of sports injuries.

I don’t really have a ‘typical’ day, every day is different.  Everyday I will spend some time with experiments.  Not just designing and doing experiments, also designing and building the equipment needed to do them.  Because my experiments are done on people I also spend quite a bit of time recruiting people to participate in my experiments and in turn I participate as a subject in experiments for other scientists that I work with.  I would spend some time everyday teaching more junior scientists.  Then there is reading and writing.  I spend a large part of my day reading to keep up with what other scientists around the world have found and writing up my own work for publication so that other people can read about what I’ve discovered.

I grew up and went to school in the country.  It was difficult to learn about science and engineering at school, apart from something like “you need to go to uni.”  In the country there are not as many large companies that employ scientists or engineers, there are no large research hospitals and there are no large research universities.  I would use the money to make it easier for school students in country Australia who are interested in studying science or engineering to meet practising scientists and engineers.  This could be by helping schools fund visits by scientists, by funding students to visit scientists or even helping students interested in science and engineering to travel to do a work experience placement.