Jo Nijs is full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) where he runs the Pain in Motion research group (www.paininmotion.be), physiotherapist/manual therapist at the University Hospital Brussels, and Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden). Twenty years ago, he pioneered in studying central sensitization in a variety of pain conditions, including osteoarthritis, cancer, back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, and fibromyalgia. This led to developing and testing innovative interventions, and continued efforts to unravel the chronic pain pathophysiology with a focus on epigenetic mechanisms.

His work contributed to the paradigm shift from a from a tissue- and disease-based pain management approach towards multimodal lifestyle interventions for chronic pain. He authored >360 publications (incl. papers in The Lancet, The Lancet Rheumatology, JAMA Neurology and JAMA Network Open), obtained >€21 million grant income, supervised 30 PhD’s to completion and served 390 times as an invited speaker (including 44 keynotes). He trained 4k clinicians in >100 courses. His work has been cited 15k times (h-index: 69). Jo is ranked 2nd in the world among chronic pain researchers (expertscape.com), received the 2017 Excellence in Research Award from the JOSPT (USA), and the 2020 honorary Francqui Collen Chair awarded by the University of Hasselt.

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