Summer research projects

Rotator Cuff Rehabilitation in Australia: Understanding patient experiences and current practice

Supervisor: Dr Anelise Silveira (anelise.silveira@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: This qualitative study aims to explore the experiences of individuals seeking or providing healthcare for RCRP in Australia. It will identify the barriers and enablers encountered throughout their care journey, examine their perceptions of treatment acceptability and effectiveness, and assess their willingness to participate in a future randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluating the clinical and cost-effectiveness of different rehabilitation approaches for RCRP.

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Co-Designing Tools to Support Epilepsy Inclusion in Sport and Exercise: Insights from Para Start Athletes and Trainers

Supervisor: Ms Brittany Williams (brittany.williams@uq.edu.au) and Dr Jessica Hill (jessica.hill@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: The aim of this project is to better understand the needs of athletes with epilepsy and co-occurring disability and the perspectives of trainers, and then translate these insights into actionable strategies to improve inclusion.d.

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Application of the IASP clinical criteria for nociplastic pain in patients with whiplash

Application of a multimodal tool to discriminate pain descriptors in patients with whiplash

What’s impacting your back pain

Examining the Social Networks of Adults with Hearing Loss

Translation & Validation of the Physical Literacy Profile Questionnaire (PLP-Quest) for Children and Youth with Disabilities

Supervisor: Dr Georgina Clutterbuck (g.clutterbuck@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: Physical Literacy refers to the positive cycle of developing physical, social, cognitive and psychological skills through participation in physical activity. This project involves translating and evaluating the Physical Literacy Profile Questionnaire (PLPQuest) into English from Brazilian Portuguese, ensuring its relevance and validity in the Australian context. The scholar will work with another Portuguese speaker to forward and back translate the assessment and then test the subsequent English version with Australian children.

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Evaluation of a Paediatric Allied-Health led Videofluoroscopic Swallow Study (VFSS) Clinic at the Queensland Children’s Hospital

Development of the Aphasia Implementation Toolkit – an implementation intervention to improve services for stroke survivors with aphasia

Supervisor: Dr Kirstine Shrubsole (k.shrubsole@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: There are evidence-practice gaps in aphasia care, and speech pathologists face challenges in changing practices to close these gaps. This project aims to improve aphasia services through developing an implementation toolkit that can be tailored to services to meet their needs. The Aphasia Implementation Toolkit will be developed as a fit-for-purpose, multi-component implementation intervention to support the provision of best practice in aphasia services.

This project will take forward priorities identified by people with lived experience of aphasia and clinicians. This project will incorporate principles of behaviour change theory and co-production to develop much-needed implementation support to address the national priorities for aphasia. Overall, the project seeks to improves outcomes for speech pathologists and for people living with aphasia.

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Reframing Autism Assessments: Helping families to understand and engage in the autism assessment journey

Supervisors: Dr Rebecca Armstrong (rebecca.armstrong@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: Families frequently report that autism assessment processes provide limited understanding of their child’s needs, insufficient explanation of purpose, and little practical guidance after assessment. Emerging evidence from the Therapeutic Assessment literature suggests that assessment itself can be a valuable intervention when conducted with transparency and collaboration. This research project is focused on evaluating whether a lived experience, evidence-informed assessment model improves parent confidence, understanding and engagement through the autism assessment journey compared with usual care.

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Legal Vocabulary and Youth Justice: Developing an Evidence-Informed Tool

Supervisors: Dr Rebecca Armstrong (rebecca.armstrong@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: Up to 90% of young people in custody have speech, language, and communication needs, yet they are expected to navigate a justice system filled with complex legal terms. In Queensland, the Legal Vocabulary Screen is used in Youth Justice but there are no current norms for comparing. Our project is addressing this gap by understanding how well typically developing adolescents understand legal concepts, and comparing this knowledge with that of young people who have offended. By strengthening the Legal Vocabulary Screen used by Queensland Youth Justice speech-language pathologists, we aim to build an evidence-based tool that supports fairer, more accessible justice. The summer scholar will help shape this research through literature reviews, data scoring, and tool development.

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The experiences of parents of children with disability when accessing mental health services

Supervisor: Dr Tomomi McAuliffe (t.mcauliffe@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: This project aims to investigate the experiences of parents of children with disability or chronic illness in accessing mental health services. The summer scholarship student will contribute to the project by being involved in the research process, for example extensive literature review, data collection and analysis, and drafting of the introduction section of a manuscript with guidance.

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Neural correlates of recovery from aphasia after stroke

Supervisor: A/Prof Stephen Wilson (smwilson@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: Aphasia (loss of language) is one of the most common and debilitating consequences of stroke. Fortunately, most individuals with aphasia experience some degree of recovery over time. However, there is great variability in terms of the extent of recovery. The overall goals of this project are (1) to describe the nature of recovery from aphasia in the first year after stroke; (2) to identify neuroimaging, behavioral, and patient-related predictors of recovery; and (3) to characterize the neural correlates of recovery using functional and structural imaging.

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Navigating Motor Neuron Disease: Exploring the voices from the frontline of care and experience

Supervisor: Dr Rebecca Packer (rebecca.packer@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: This project explores the lived experiences of motor neuron disease from the perspectives of patients, carers, and health professionals using qualitative methods. Activities include literature review, ethics preparation, interview transcription, and preliminary data analysis.

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A scoping review of return to sport for athletes with hip or pelvic-related tendinopathy: definitions and criteria

Supervisor: Dr Viana Vuvan (v.vuvan@uq.edu.au) & Mr Brent Sahota (b.sahota@uq.edu.au)

Project Description: The research project explores how return to sport is defined and investigates the criteria used to guide athletes with hip or pelvic-related tendinopathy in returning to sport. Students will contribute to the scoping review by assisting with title and abstract and full text screening and data extraction.

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