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Emmah is an experienced occupational therapist and researcher in the field of brain injury rehabilitation. Emmah's PhD, completed in 2010, compared the effectiveness of an outpatient brain injury rehabilitation program in home and hospital settings.

Research Interests

Emmah has conducted collaborative research in the field of neurorehabilitation, partnering with consumers and clinicians to develop and trial rehabilitation approaches to enhance person-centred care, goal setting and cognitive rehabilitation. Other research interest areas include metacognitive and occupation-based treatment approaches, the use of technology in rehabilitation, outcome measurement, and community-based rehabilitation.

Research Expertise

Emmah has conducted research using quantitative and qualitative methodologies including randomised controlled trials and single case experimental design. Emmah has an interest in knowledge translation, has conducted implementation research using a range of implementation frameworks, and codesigned with end-users including consumers and clinicians.

I am an experimental psychologist studying sensation, perception, and cognition.

I use fundamental psychophysics and visual neuroscience to investigate:

1) Basic sensory processes underlying binocular depth perception in basic and applied contexts.

- how does the brain interpret binocular disparity, occlusion depth cues?

- how do perceptual mechanisms resolve ambiguities in depth and spatial layout?

2) Multisensory perception and cross-modal interactions.

- how visual perception is influenced by inputs from other senses such as audition?

- how is the interaction between vision and audition influenced by context, experience, and expectation?

3) Applied visual perception in virtual reality and surgical settings.

- how does depth perception, eye movements, and visuomotor performance differ between virtual reality environments and the real world?

- How 3D versus 2D viewing affects performance in surgical tasks such as laparoscopic (keyhole) surgery and training?

Sarah is an occupational therapist with over 20 years clinical experience delivering specialised brain injury and complex neurological intervention across the continuum of care in Australia and the UK. Sarah is passionate about conducting research which enables improved rehabilitation outcomes and quality of life for people with brain injury. Her PhD, completed in 2018, investigated client-centred goal setting in the rehabilitation of community dwelling clients with acquired brain injury. The PhD provides insight into how clinicians may implement the client-centred goal setting process in practice to ensure that the meaningful and personally relevant goals of people with brain injury can be formulated, despite known barriers such as memory and self-awareness impairment.

Sarah is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in Brain Injury Rehabilitation, Surgical Treatment and Rehabilitation Service (STARS) Education and Research Alliance, the University of Queensland. She also works in her private practice, to provide specialised brain injury rehabilitation services in Queensland, Australia.