Linda is an Associate Professor and Graduate Research Coordinator in the Occupational Therapy Department at Monash University, Australia. She has many years of clinical experience working with people with spinal cord injury (SCI), prior to joining Monash University as a teaching and research academic. Linda's PhD and subsequent research and engagement program has focused on maximising the social, economic and community participation of people with SCI. She has been an investigator on over 3 million dollars of funded research, including an RCT implementing a trial of an early vocational rehabilitation service for people following traumatic injury. Her research uses participatory, co-design 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.

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