Helen Dawes, PhD

Helen Dawes is Professor of Clinical Rehabilitation in Human Movement Grouping in the College of Medicine and Health, University of Exeter. Helen is a clinical academic working as a physiotherapist and exercise scientist with an ambition to enable people living with conditions affecting their movement to be able to move more. She has been based at Oxford Brookes University and working for the Oxford Health BRC and closely collaborating with key colleagues at the University of Oxford, and McGill, Shanghai Jiao Tong/ Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital, Sao Paulo, Drexel, Aarhus, Monash and Oslo Universities. Her main research focus is translation of individualised rehabilitation into clinical practice, informed and underpinned by basic research into mechanisms, with innovation of methodologies for the delivery and evaluation of interventional outcomes. Her ambition is to harness the very latest technologies to improve human well-being in health and disease, focussing on personalised treatments for disorders of movement and posture and assess and deliver these at scale. She uses a wide variety of technologies to monitor movement and posture, and associated body systems, often as part of large cohorts, supported by an excellent and eclectic multi-disciplinary team, nationally, and internationally. Her intention is to develop technologies which can be transferrable between diseases and systems and are affordable to ensure Global applicability. Helen’s main research themes can be summarised as: Exercise and Rehabilitation, Movement Science Mechanisms and Validating Outcome measures. She is currently funded by the NIHR, EPSRC, Charities, Innovate, UKRI, NIH, and CIHR.