In early November, the team spent a productive week at the 2019 International Spinal Cord Society (ISCoS) Annual Scientific Meeting. In addition to the many interesting sessions we attended, the SRI presented two posters, co-hosted a workshop, met our travel grant recipients, and discussed exciting new opportunities with international peers.

Every year the SRI is pleased to award several international travel grants to support the work of early career researchers. This year, seven grants were awarded to some of the brightest up and coming researchers in the field of SCI.

We had the pleasure of meeting some of our 2019 grant recipients at a breakfast we hosted for early career researchers during ISCoS. It was great to hear about the work they are doing towards improved health outcomes for people with SCI. We were also joined at the breakfast by a group of experienced researchers and past travel grant recipients who shared their insights into developing their research careers.

We will share more from our travel grant recipients in the coming months.

At the SRI, we believe that those impacted by the research process have a right to be part of the process, and it was fantastic to co-deliver a presentation at ISCoS on ‘Meaningful Consumer Engagement in SCI Research’.

We are collaborating to build capacity so that researchers know how and when to best engage people with lived experience of spinal cord injury (“consumers”), and people with lived experience are equipped with the skills and knowledge to contribute as partners throughout the research process.

Thanks to our fabulous presenters – Prof Kim Anderson-Erisman from North American Spinal Cord Injury Consortium, John Chernesky from Praxis Spinal Cord Institute in Canada and Kylie Cochrane from IAP2 Australasia, and support from Dr Johnny Bourke from Burwood Academy of Independent Living in New Zealand. The session had a great turnout from delegates and the discussion that followed was engaging and productive, and will help guide our program activities.

This is just the beginning of an exciting program of work. Stay tuned as we progress this in the coming months.

Photos (clockwise from top left): The SRI’s Kristine Hendry and Emma Peleg with our consumer engagement poster; Professor Kim Anderson-Erisman and John Chernesky presenting at our workshop; Emma and Kristine with Nishu Tyagi, one of our travel grant recipients; Emma and Kristine with our consumer engagement poster; some of our past and present travel grant recipients.