Meet the TSCIR Special Issue Breathing and Sleep Guest Editors
Dr. David Berlowitz is a Physiotherapist with the Victorian Respiratory Support Service who holds the University of Melbourne Chair in Physiotherapy at Austin Health in Melbourne, Australia. David was awarded his PhD in 2004 in which he discovered that acute cervical spinal cord injury results in sudden and severe obstructive sleep apnoea. David leads an international team of research collaborators, students and staff who examine the causes and treatments of sleep and breathing disorders in neuromuscular disease, especially Spinal Cord Injury and Motor Neurone Disease. David’s research encompasses respiratory physiology, sleep, health systems research, and clinical trials of therapies and care models.
Dr Marnie Graco is a post-doctoral researcher and Implementation Scientist with a clinical background in physiotherapy. Dr Graco’s research aims to improve the health and quality of life of people living with neuromuscular diseases, by increasing the uptake of evidence-based treatments of their sleep and breathing disorders. Her PhD (University of Melbourne 2019) investigated the clinical management of sleep disordered breathing in people with spinal cord injury, and she is now testing alternative models of care to address the problems she identified. She currently works at the Institute for Breathing and Sleep (Austin Health, Melbourne, Australia).
Dr Nicole Sheers is a senior respiratory physiotherapist with the state-wide home mechanical ventilation service (Victorian Respiratory Support Service, Austin Health, Melbourne, Australia), and a post-doctoral clinician researcher at The University of Melbourne. Nicole’s extensive clinical experience in caring for people with chronic ventilatory failure and neuromuscular diseases uniquely positioned her to undertake a randomised controlled trial of lung volume recruitment as part of her PhD (awarded 2021). Her research focuses on improving respiratory function, symptoms and cough in people living with neuromuscular diseases.
