A life’s work in
rehabilitation science.

Professor Catherine Sackley is a leading figure in rehabilitation research, with a forty-year body of work on how people recover everyday function after stroke and neurological illness. Following her PhD at Nottingham, she has held senior fellowships at Nottingham, Oxford and Birmingham, and a professorial chair at King’s College London.

Her research portfolio spans randomised controlled trials, feasibility studies and cluster RCTs across stroke, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, hip fracture and care-home rehabilitation. Her landmark cluster trial of physiotherapy and occupational therapy for care home residents, published in the BMJ, remains a reference point in the field.

She has shaped national policy and research infrastructure through contributions to the Royal College of Physicians’ National Clinical Guidelines for Stroke, NICE guidelines on falls and multiple sclerosis, and Cochrane reviews across stroke and musculoskeletal groups. As a board member of NIHR HS&DR and a member of the MRC College of Experts, she has helped direct the allocation of millions in competitive UK research funding.

Her work now extends internationally. She leads the NIHR Global Health Group on stroke in Sierra Leone and advises on rehabilitation capacity building in Rwanda, translating decades of UK methodology into low-resource health systems.