Dr Julia Kirby is a graduate of the University of Adelaide Medical School and completed her orthopaedic training in Victoria and Tasmania before commencing practice as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon in 2020. Dr Kirby has special interests in sports injury and orthopaedic trauma surgery, and prior to her orthopaedic training, she also completed a Master of Sports Medicine at The University of Queensland. Dr Kirby has recently completed a fellowship in adult knee surgery with OrthoSport Victoria and will soon be travelling to Dallas, Texas in the USA for a fellowship in paediatric sports orthopaedics at Texas Scottish Rite Hospital – but not before sitting down with me to tell her story!

Associate Professor Claudia Di Bella was born in Italy and gained her medical degree from the oldest medical school in the Western World at the University of Bologna. Associate Professor Di Bella then went on to complete her orthopaedic training at one of Europe’s premier specialist orthopaedic hospitals at the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute. Nowadays living in Australia, Claudia is a Fellow of the Australian Orthopaedic Association, specialising in joint replacement surgery and the complex subspeciality of orthopaedic oncology treating bone and soft tissue tumours. Claudia is also the head of the Cartilage Regeneration Program within the department of surgery at the University of Melbourne.

Professor David Hunter is the Florance and Cope Chair of Rheumatology and Professor of Medicine at The University of Sydney, and a Staff Specialist at Royal North Shore Hospital and North Sydney Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Centre. Professor Hunter is the number one ranked expert in osteoarthritis on Expertscape.com with an impressive 532* peer-reviewed publications. He has co-authored several books ranging from the medical textbooks on osteoarthritis to self-management books for patients suffering from osteoarthritis. He is also the section editor for the UpToDate Osteoarthritis page and host of the Joint Action podcast.

*Professor Hunter's profile:

https://www.sydney.edu.au/medicine-health/about/our-people/academic-staff/david-hunter.html 

Joint Action Podcast:

https://www.jointaction.info/podcast

UpToDate osteoarthritis page:

https://www.uptodate.com/contents/table-of-contents/rheumatology/osteoarthritis

Is being barefoot, wearing shoes and physical activity associated with knee osteoarthritis pain flares? Data from a usually barefoot Sri Lankan cohort: 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1756-185X.14024

Effects of Intensive Diet and Exercise on Knee Joint Loads, Inflammation, and Clinical Outcomes Among Overweight and Obese Adults With Knee Osteoarthritis The IDEA Randomized Clinical Trial: 

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1741824 

Rhys Adams and Scott Hawthorne were highly talented athletes in cricket and football, respectively. Rhys and Scott have in common an incredible five complete anterior cruciate ligament tears each. These injuries significantly affected their sporting aspirations and forced them both into premature sporting retirement. Nowadays, they have both successfully transitioned into the next phases of their lives with Rhys working as a Physical Education Teacher and Head of House at Carey Baptist Grammar School, while Scott is an expert in Melbourne commercial real estate and works as a Negotiator in Melbourne City Sales & Development Sites for the CBRE Group.

Daniel Gould is the President of the Student Orthopaedic and Musculoskeletal Association and the first Doctor of Medicine student at The University of Melbourne to enter into an MD-PhD program. Dan is investigating the use of natural language processing and machine learning techniques applied to clinical predictive modelling to personalise care for total knee replacement patients. Sid Rele is the Treasurer of SOMA and an MD-PhD student whose research focuses on the length of stay of patients undergoing total joint replacement surgery and the patient-related factors that impact outcomes of total joint replacement.

Professor Peter Brooks is Research Lead of Northern Health and has Professorial appointments at Melbourne University in the Centre for Health Policy at the School of Population and Global Health and in the School of Medicine. Peter established the Australian Health Workforce Institute at the University of Melbourne in 2008 and is a frequent commentator on health policy and the importance of developing an evidence base in this area. In 2010 he was awarded Membership of the Order of Australia for services to rheumatology as a clinician, researcher and academic.