© JOHN CAIRNS
As a physiotherapist at University Hospital Zurich in the mid-2000s, Annina Schmid often encountered people with chronic pain. “My interest in research got sparked while I was seeing my patients,” she says. “It was very difficult to treat them, or to understand why pain persists in some people, while it doesn’t even occur in others.”
Schmid, who grew up in Switzerland, had earned her master’s degree in clinical physiotherapy in 2005 at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and she was keen to return down under. In 2008, she secured an Endeavour Europe Scholarship from the Australian Government and moved to the University of Queensland in Brisbane for a PhD in neuroscience.
“She’s very motivated,” says Schmid’s colleague and collaborator Brigitte Tampin, a musculoskeletal physiotherapist at ...
