Professor Roberta Shepherd

AO, FACP, DHScSydneyhonoris causa, EdDColumbia, MA, Dip Phty

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Professor Roberta Sherpard was one of our consumer advisors Safe Exercise at Home.

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Professor Roberta Shepherd graduated with a Diploma in Physiotherapy, University of Sydney 1956 and completed Masters and Doctoral degrees at Columbia University, New York from 1986-91. Her awards included Fulbright and Rockefeller Scholarships. In 1992 she was appointed Foundation Chair of Physiotherapy, University of Sydney and is an Honorary Professor of Physiotherapy, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney. She was awarded an Order of Australia in 2018 and is a Fellow of the Australian College of Physiotherapists.

 

She has had extensive teaching experience over 45 years and has been an invited or keynote speaker at over 35 physiotherapy, medical and neuroscience conferences in Australia and overseas. She has authored more than 70 research articles in physiotherapy, medical, biomechanics and neuroscience journals, 8 textbooks translated into several languages, and 15 book chapters. Research student supervision has involved undergraduate honours, masters and doctorate degrees.

 

Roberta’s major research interests continue to be in the movement sciences, including biomechanical studies of standing up and sitting down, and gait, and following stroke, head injury and in infants with cerebral palsy. Roberta has collaborated in teaching, writing and research with Professor Janet Carr since the 1960s until Janet died in 2014. Together with their colleagues she and Janet developed task- and context-specific exercise and training, applying principles of motor learning and the movement sciences, and there is now evidence that these are basic principles of rehabilitation.