QBIC: Researcher Spotlight

After completing a PhD in social psychology, Dr Jessie Mitchell moved to a position as Research Fellow at The Hopkins Centre at Griffith University. Since beginning there in 2021, she has been looking at interventions that can help maximise recovery and outcomes for people with acquired brain injury. 

Jessie is highly focused on engaging people with lived experience of brain injury in her research. In a collaborative project between clinicians from the Metro South Health Brain Injury Rehabilitation Service Continuum and Hopkins Centre researchers led by Dr Annerley Bates and Professor Tamara Ownsworth, Dr Mitchell wants to understand the challenges and facilitators of self-advocacy as people with ABI go through early care transitions. She says that by encouraging and enabling greater self-advocacy, people living with ABI feel empowered by the choice and control they have during their rehabilitation, which enhances their sense of dignity. These benefits can be essential to personalising care and maximising health outcomes. 

Dr Mitchell is also leading a Hopkins Centre Seed Grant focused on employment outcomes for people living with ABI or spinal cord injury with a team of service providers, academic researchers, and citizen researchers. These injuries can have severe consequences, and even people who can return to employment often end up leaving the workforce before retirement age. By working with those who have maintained employment for 12 months or more after injury, as well as their employers and rehabilitation providers, Dr Mitchell and her team want to understand what can be done to help sustain employment after a neurological injury. The goal is to develop practical knowledge and resources that help both employers and employees create inclusive workplaces, ultimately leading to better long-term employment outcomes for people living with a neurological injury.

For Dr Mitchell, directly working with people with ABI is central to her collaborative approach. “Engaging and partnering with people with lived experience of ABI is key to developing brain injury interventions and supports. It helps us understand their day-to-day priorities, shapes the solutions we develop, and guides how we should translate our findings into practice.”