I am an Associate Professor and Graduate Research Coordinator in the Occupational Therapy Department at Monash University, Australia. I have many years of clinical experience working with people with spinal cord injury (SCI), prior to joining Monash University as a teaching and research academic. My PhD and subsequent research and engagement program has focused on maximising the social, economic and community participation of people with SCI. I have been an investigator on over 3 million dollars of funded research. My research uses co-design, participatory and qualitative methods to understand the lived experience.

Pierre Mertens – Biography (ISCOS) Pierre Mertens (Belgium, 1953) is a psychotherapist, artist, and international advocate for children with spina bifida. His work combines lived experience, community empowerment, and international collaboration to improve access to care in low-resource settings. His engagement began in 1978 when his first daughter, Liesje, was born with spina bifida. Confronted with the lack of information available to parents at the time, he and his wife founded the Belgian Association for Spina Bifida in 1979. This early initiative grew into a lifelong commitment to strengthening peer support and improving access to treatment and long-term care for affected children worldwide. In 1987 he joined the board of the International Federation for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus (IF) and served as President from 1995 to 2012. During this period, he initiated international solidarity programmes connecting parent groups and medical professionals in the Global North and South. These collaborations supported neurosurgical treatment and follow-up care for more than 50,000 children with spina bifida, particularly in East Africa. To respond to the growing demand for sustainable care, he founded Child-Help in 2006, which later evolved into Child-Help International. The organisation works with local partners strengthing multidisciplinary care, parent support groups, continence management programmes, and training initiatives in low-resource settings. Today Child-Help supports programmes across Africa, Asia, and other regions. Professionally, Pierre Mertens worked for nearly four decades as a psychotherapist specialising in chronic pain and severe psychiatric conditions in adolescents and adults. Alongside this career, he developed socially engaged art projects addressing themes such as disability, memory, and human dignity. He is the author of several books on disability and care, including Liesje, translated into eight languages, and Bare Together (2025). His current work focuses on strengthening peer counselling and affordable continence management for children with NTD's in fragile health systems

Marie Aileen C. Asistores, M.D. completed her specialized residency training in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Philippine Orthopedic Center, a national referral center for spinal injuries in the country. Her clinical and research interests focus on spinal cord injury rehabilitation, with a particular emphasis on the psychosocial dynamics of family-centered care in resource-limited settings. Dr. Asistores is dedicated to bridging the gap between clinical discharge and sustainable home-based recovery through the development of structured support systems for informal caregivers.

Dr. Punithamalar Sundrasegaran is a Rehabilitation Physician and Head of the Rehabilitation Medicine Department at Hospital Keningau, Sabah, Malaysia, where she leads the development of specialist rehabilitation services in a rural and geographically underserved region of East Malaysia. She obtained her MBBS from AIMST University, Malaysia in 2012 and completed her Master of Rehabilitation Medicine (MRehabMED) at Universiti Malaya in 2023. She has further pursued advanced subspecialty training in regenerative and interventional musculoskeletal medicine, including a Prolotherapy Diploma from the European School of Prolotherapy (2024) and a Fellowship in Musculoskeletal & Pain Ultrasound (2025). Her clinical and scholarly work focuses on spinal cord injury rehabilitation, musculoskeletal and pain rehabilitation, and regenerative rehabilitation, with a particular interest in adapting evidence-based rehabilitation strategies to resource-limited and rural settings. She has been deeply involved in building multidisciplinary rehabilitation pathways in Sabah, including inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation expansion, community-based rehabilitation initiatives, and structured spinal cord injury rehabilitation programs tailored to the realities of rural practice. Dr. Punithamalar is actively engaged in professional leadership and academic collaboration. She serves on committees under the Malaysian Association of Rehabilitation Physicians, particularly in the areas of regenerative medicine, musculoskeletal rehabilitation, pain medicine, and spinal cord injury rehabilitation. She is also the Sabah Project Leader for the International Spinal Cord Society (ISCoS) Standards Toolkit Pilot Programme, where she leads efforts to strengthen standardized spinal cord injury education and rehabilitation delivery in the region. Her academic contributions include co-authoring Handbook to CCI Points (UM Press, 2024) and contributing to Rural CBR: Musculoskeletal CBR. She has led major educational initiatives such as the Rehab Back Bootcamp 2024 and the Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Workshop 2025, and has presented and published work on tetraplegia, amputation rehabilitation, and innovative musculoskeletal interventions at national and international scientific platforms.

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Md Muid Hossain Reshad is a physiotherapist by background and currently works as a Rehabilitation Development Officer (RDO) at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed (CRP), Bangladesh. He has over five years of clinical experience working with individuals with neurological conditions, as well as more than two years of experience in rehabilitation development. Alongside his professional responsibilities in organizational development and project management, he continues to provide clinical rehabilitation services to patients. His work focuses on disability inclusion and rehabilitation for individuals with stroke, spinal cord injury, and traumatic brain injury. He is passionate about strengthening rehabilitation systems in low-resource settings through research and evidence-based practice. His long-term goal is to pursue advanced academic training and contribute to the development of comprehensive rehabilitation models that can be adapted and implemented across diverse healthcare settings worldwide.