Research
Ageing, pain and athletic performance are usually studied by different people in different buildings. They share a substrate: how the cortex allocates resources to a body under load. We study that substrate directly.
Frailty is scored at the body but decided in the cortex. We phenotype older adults across physical, cognitive, psychological and social axes, then ask which prefrontal signatures separate the subtypes, including during curved and dual-task walking, where compensation becomes visible.
Central sensitisation, pain neuroscience education, and non-invasive brain stimulation in chronic musculoskeletal pain, where the tissue has healed and the map has not. Our trials pair PNE with manual therapy, and tDCS with task training, to ask what actually changes the central representation.
Orthopaedic manual therapy and sports medicine: chronic ankle instability, joint mobilization strategies, blood flow restriction, and return-to-sport decisions. The recurring question is what separates a compensation from a recovery.
Models built on cohort, wearable and neuroimaging data, validated in living labs, not only in held-out test sets. Urban and rural sites are built into the design, because a model that only works downtown is not a model.
Themes
The four questions above are how we think. These are the six deliverables the work is pointed at: the things that have to exist at the end for any of it to have mattered.
A precision rehabilitation route for chronic pain that starts from central sensitisation rather than the painful tissue.
Orthopaedic physical therapy trials aimed at a clinical standard for musculoskeletal pain management.
Functional recovery read through exercise physiology and biological markers, not questionnaires alone.
AI and wearable sensing for combined cognitive–motor rehabilitation in older adults.
Neuromodulation as a treatment route for pain that has stopped responding to peripheral care.
High-efficiency rehabilitation protocols after surgery and in degenerative disease.
Flagship project
One project runs across the whole five-year horizon and ties the pain work together.
Chronic pain is scored with a single number, yet two people with the same score can need opposite treatment. BPS-PPIS learns a bio-psycho-social phenotype from multimodal signals, then matches each phenotype to the intervention most likely to help. The work spans chronic spinal pain and fibromyalgia across a five-year programme.
Supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), funded by the Korea government (MSIT).
Grant RS-2026-25591593
Infrastructure
A lab is its instruments and its access to people. We have both, and the second one is harder to get.
In the lab
In the field