Prof Mick Thacker Email & Phone Number

Professor Mick Thacker is Professor of Pain, Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He has had a life-long interest in nociception and pain. Mick’s career has followed a path of attempting to understand pain across its' many dimensions. He qualified as a physiotherapist in 1987. He undertook an MSc in Neuroscience at UCL submitting a thesis on the Autonomic Nervous system and Pain. He then pursued an academic career becoming a lecturer at Brunel University and then St Georges Medical School. He joined KCL in 2000 to combine his PhD studies with a lecturing post; he wrote and led the award winning MSc in Pain Science for 12 years. His PhD thesis focused on the role of Chemokines in the production and maintenance of neuropathic pain. He undertook a post doctoral fellowship in Neuroimaging and Pain at the institute of Psychiatry where he worked closely with basic scientists, clinicians (neurology, psychiatry, dentistry, rheumatology and neuropharmacology) and pioneered research on neuroimmune interactions in the CNS. He was awarded a Fellowship by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy in 2011 in recognition of his groundbreaking work in Pain Neuroscience and clinical practice . Mick was a Senior Research Fellow at The University of South Australia from 2010 to 2015 and then accepted a Senior Clinical Lectureship and Senior AHP Consultant King’s Health Partnership, leading a multidisciplinary pain research group and clinics focused on those with complex pain presentations.Still with many unanswered questions about pain he enrolled on a second PhD in Philosophy and Cognitive Neuroscience at the university of Edinburgh, focusing on Predictive Processing and Pain. He moved to South Bank University London taking a personal chair in Pain, Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation in 2017 and then the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 2022.He has co-designed and trained a Large Language Model on pain and active inference which is due to launch later this year. He has published over 100 peer reviewed papers across pain related topics, 10 book chapters including in the Textbook of Pain, and Routledge Textbook of The Philosophy of PainHe has won several prestigious awards for his work. He presented a TEDx talk on Predictive Processing and Pain in 2020.Mick has consulted for Salaso Healthcare Solutions for the last seven years, acting as their Chief Clinical Officer since 2021. He has co-designed several patient facing digital platforms whilst at Salaso.