ProfessorMichael Nicholas

PhD, MPsychol(Clin), MSc(Hons), MAPS, FFPMANZCA(Hon)

Professor Michael Nicholas is a Clinical Psychologist with over 40 years of experience in the field of pain. He is the Director of Pain Education at the Pain Management Research Institute - Kolling Institute, Sydney Medical School and the Director of multidisciplinary pain managment programs (including ADAPT) at the MJC Pain Management & Research Centre at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney.

Since 1980, Professor Nicholas has combined research and clinical pain practice, particularly multidisciplinary applications of psychology. He first completed a Bachelor of Science at the University of Otago in New Zealand. In 1988, he completed his PhD entitled "An Evaluation of Treatments for Chronic Low Back Pain". As part of this, he established the first Multidisciplinary Back Pain program at Westmead Hospital in Sydney and developed the Pain Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (PSEQ), a 10-item questionnaire developed to assess the confidence people with chronic pain have in performing activities despite their pain.The PSEQ has been translated into 50 languages around the world and is widely used in clinical settings and research in pain management.

In 1988, he was appointed the inaugural Director of the INPUT Multidisciplinary Pain Management Program at St Thomas's Hospital in London, UK. In 1991, he returned to Australia to work at the University of NSW (UNSW) as a Senior Lecturer.

In 1994, he was approached by Professor Michael Cousins to take up a conjoint position at the Pain Management Research Institute (PMRI), University of Sydney and at the then newly established MJC Pain Management & Research Centre at Royal North Shore Hospital. He was asked to be involved in the development of the Masters postgraduate degree program in Pain Management. The degree commenced in 1996 and has grown into an internationally recognised online graduate education program for all health disciplines. In 2012, he became Director of Pain Education, PMRI, a role which includes oversight of this degree program along with the development of continuing education webinars, workshops and symposia in pain management for health professionals.

He established the ADAPT Pain Management Program based on the success of the INPUT program. More than 400 ADAPT programs have been run since 1994, improving the life of many patients living with persisting pain. He is the lead author ofManage Your Pain, the primary self-help resource used in these self-management programs, now in it's third edition.

Since 2013, he has been a member of the Executive of the Pain Network for the NSW Agency for Clinical Innovation (ACI) and was co-chair of this committee from 2016-2022. This network is responsible for implementing multidisciplinary pain management services across NSW.

Following on from decades of leading research into occupational rehabilitation of injured workers in Australia, Professor Nicholas led the Work Injury Screening and Early Intervention (WISE) study which was a novel collaboration between employers, insurers, health care providers and injured workers. This research demonstrated highly valuable outcomes from an early coordinated psychosocial intervention for injured workers at risk of delayed recovery. The NSW Ministry of Health has now implemented the protocol for this intervention for injured health workers across NSW Hospitals.

Professor Nicholas is also a recognised as an international leader in the investigation of psychosocial contributors to persisting pain and predictors of pain outcomes. His collaboration with Professor Steve Linton at Örebro University in Sweden led to the development and testing of the Örebro Musculoskeletal Pain Screening Questionnaire which is widely used in clinical practice around the world to predict occupational outcomes in injured workers. In 2015, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Sweden’s Örebro University and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences to celebrate his dedicated work on the influence of psychological factors on pain perception

He was an invited member of the International Association for the Study of Pain's (IASP) international taskforce which advised the World Health Organisation (WHO) on pain diagnoses for the recently approved eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, ICD-11, which is the global standard for coding health information and causes of death. See The IASP classification of chronic pain for ICD-11: chronic primary pain and the Chronic pain as a symptom or a disease: the IASP Classification of Chronic Pain for the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).

He was also the co-editor of and contributor to the International Association for the Study of Pain's (IASP) Multidisciplinary Center Development Toolkit. This manual focuses on how to create a Multidisciplinary Pain Center which is recommended as an efficient first step for lower-resource countries to take towards the development of a network of multidisciplinary pain clinics in each country.

In 2022, he was the recipient of IASP’s John D Loeser Prize for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in the Clinical Science of Pain. The recipient’s publications and teaching demonstrates not only an expertise in their particular field but an interest in combining the insights from their work with knowledge and perspectives from other disciplines.

His many years of research in pain, its treatment, and the need for early intervention to prevent the development of long-term disability in people with musculoskeletal disorders has both national and international recognition, as reflected in over 300 publications in peer reviewed journals and book chapters, 23,000 citations, and an h-index of 73 (Google Scholar).

Michael receives frequent requests to speak and teach at national and international pain conferences. He has attracted >$ 4 million in research grant funding over the last 5 years and >$12 million in total.

In the last 10 years he has been actively engaged in training health workers of all disciplines in the provision of pain self-management training for people with chronic pain in rural and low resource settings, as well as for those working in the CALD communities.