Meet 2024 Keynote Speakers Joletta Belton & Cassandra Macgregor

About Joletta: Hey there, thanks for reading my bio. I go by Jo. I'm a reader, writer, nature lover, snowboarder, and activist, I also live with pain, although I’m living quite well with it at the moment. I got hurt many a moon ago working as a firefighter paramedic. I wasn’t doing anything cool, just stepped off the fire engine awkwardly. It wasn’t much of anything at the time, then became life-altering and world upending. I medically retired from the career that had defined me and started down a path of trying to better understand pain. I’m still on that path.

MyCuppaJo.substack.com is where I muse about pain, epistemic justice, equity, and ethics; everything from my own lived experiences of pain and trauma and struggling to find the right care, to pain research and treatment, to how we think about and treat pain (and people with pain) in the broader world. I'm also a patient partner in pain research, the Patient & Public Partnerships editor at JOSPT, and a fierce advocate for the equitable inclusion of lived expertise in the work of pain.

About Cassandra: Cass is a Clinical Specialist Physiotherapist at NHS Lanarkshire Chronic Pain Service, providing input to pain care with the interdisciplinary team, and across different health services. She is undertaking a PhD studentship jointly funded by NHS Lanarkshire and Glasgow Caledonian University. Her PhD research takes a critical perspective on ‘acceptance’ of chronic pain, considering how health inequities impact this experience and using intersectionality as a theoretical framework to develop the research program.

Her qualifications include BSc. (Hons) in Physiotherapy from Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh (2001) and MSc. in Pain Science and Management from Keele University (2014). Cass has worked as a physiotherapist in London, Australia, New Zealand and Scotland, moving from community, musculoskeletal and primary care work, to a focus on chronic pain with NHS Lanarkshire in 2010.

The presentation at San Diego includes PhD research conducted with: Dr Chris Seenan, Prof Emmanuelle Tulle (Glasgow Caledonian University); Claire L Campbell (NHS Fife), Ruth J Barber (Lanarkshire resident), Dr David N. Blane (University of Glasgow) and Dr Jackie Walumbe (University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust).

Twitter: @MacgCass

[email protected]