Rate My Professor Brigitte Tampin

Dr. Brigitte Tampin is a clinical researcher and musculoskeletal physiotherapist with over 20 years of experience in clinical musculoskeletal physiotherapy across private practice and public hospitals in Western Australia. She completed her undergraduate physiotherapy training in Germany and obtained her postgraduate qualifications—Graduate Diploma in Manipulative Therapy, Master of Science, and PhD—at Curtin University. Her PhD investigated the clinical and somatosensory characteristics of patients with nerve-related neck-arm pain and was supported by an NHMRC Postgraduate Scholarship, a Physiotherapy Research Foundation seeding grant, and a Grant-in-Aid from Arthritis Australia, resulting in five publications in high-ranking medical journals. She currently works as an Advanced Scope Physiotherapist in the Neurosurgery Spinal Clinic at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Perth. In academia, she has been a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow in the Curtin School of Allied Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, Curtin University since February 2013, and Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Business, Management and Social Sciences at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, Germany, since September 2016.

Brigitte Tampin’s research specializations center on the assessment and treatment of neuro-musculoskeletal pain disorders and neuropathic pain. Her projects include examining neuropathic pain and altered sensory nerve function in lumbar radicular pain patients via quantitative sensory testing to predict clinical outcomes, developing clinical frameworks for spine-related neck-arm pain, evaluating neural mobilisation for nerve-related cervicobrachial pain, establishing terminology and identification methods for neuropathic pain in spine-related leg pain as part of the NeuPSIG working group, defining classification criteria for cervical radiculopathy, and exploring entrapment neuropathies and somatosensory profiles. Notable publications comprise “Entrapment neuropathies: a contemporary approach to pathophysiology, clinical assessment, and management” (Schmid et al., Pain Reports, 2020), “Recommendations for terminology and the identification of neuropathic pain in people with spine-related leg pain” (Schmid et al., Pain, 2023), “Classification criteria for cervical radiculopathy: An international e-Delphi study” (Lam et al., Musculoskeletal Science and Practice, 2022), “Disentangling ‘sciatica’ to understand and characterise somatosensory profiles and potential pain mechanisms” (Tampin, Scandinavian Journal of Pain, 2022), and “Application and utility of a clinical framework for spinally referred leg pain” (Kapitza et al., PLOS ONE, 2020). Awards include the Australian Physiotherapy Association Contribution as an Emergent Researcher (2016) and Elsevier Book Prize for Masters or Doctoral student (2013).