I did my PhD in musculoskeletal pain before moving to MS research. This also made me very aware of how much time I spend sitting every day, and how this is not good for my muscles and joints. I took up ballet as an adult and this keeps me moving and forces my brain to think in a different way. I also volunteer in a large Facebook group that provides evidence-based laundry advice. This very strange hobby has taught me more about science communication than most of the science I have done professionally.

There are huge opportunities in MS research and that’s why I am doing what I am doing now. The MS community has really clear goals about the sort of research they value and want done - the passion for research and supporting researchers is what scientists need to keep going when the work is full of challenges and never finished.

Recent epidemiological research on US military recruits conclusively showed that being infected with Epstein Barr virus is a necessary (but not sufficient) cause of MS. Epidemiologists think a lot about risk, but very few epidemiologists ever get to show that risk is 100%, that something definitively causes the outcome of interest. I love the idea that one day a vaccine will be available for Epstein Barr virus, preventing people developing MS in the first place. Then, the work that scientists like myself do in terms of working out how best to treat or manage symptoms of MS won’t be needed.

The goal of my research program is to improve sleep in people living with MS, by collecting better data on sleep and MS symptoms and to create a pathway to treatments for poor sleep and possibly other MS symptoms. I will determine what objective data on sleep (from research grade FitBits) adds value to the data we would usually collect (using standard sleep questionnaires), and symptom data from an app. I also want to assess what changes in sleep are usual over time using data from MS Australia’s Australian MS Longitudinal Study, and what factors predict changes in sleep over time, and therefore need to be accounted for in future clinical trials. I will also be using data from a current clinical trial to assess whether magnetic brain stimulation (vs sham therapy) improves sleep quality and promotes remyelination in a current clinical trial.

Sleep is one of those things that people don’t think is important until they are not getting enough. People living with MS are twice as likely to have sleep in the clinically poor range than people living in the community, so poor sleep is a significant problem in people living with MS. My research has already shown that poor sleep is associated with poor quality of life independent of other symptoms. My current research program will provide context, and ideally a treatment pathway for identifying suitable treatments for sleep that can be tested in clinical trials. This may mean that in the future, poor sleep is a much smaller burden for people living with MS than it is now.

As an epidemiologist, my laptop is my laboratory. I use data from large datasets (including MS Australia’s “Australian MS Longitudinal Study”), which I analyse using a statistical program to generate research findings. I enjoy the challenge of getting the coding right to create my datasets, and the joy of seeing new results and deciding what they mean. A particular challenge of data on MS symptoms is that it is highly correlated, which our statistical techniques don’t appreciate. I enjoy thinking about how we work with this type of data to figure out what part of people’s symptom experience matters most in terms of predicting clinically relevant outcomes, such as MS progression or quality of life over time.