Congratulations to Dr Sandy Shultz on his promotion to Professor

Dr Sandy Shultz

The Central Clinical School is delighted to announce that translational neuroscientist, Dr Sandy Shultz, has been promoted to Professor in the latest academic promotions rounds.

Professor Shultz has established himself as a national and international leader in ‘bench-to-bedside’ neurotrauma research. More specifically, specialising in mild traumatic brain injury and the identification, validation and implementation of biomarkers to enable better diagnosis and management of people who experience concussion. 

He has established and grown the Monash Trauma Group - a highly productive research team within the Central Clinical School’s Department of Neuroscience that is recognised widely as Australia’s leading translational neurotrauma research group. Professor Shultz has led in the group’s scientific direction, successfully obtaining multiple competitive grants totalling over $50M along the way. Prof Shultz has also recruited and supervised more than 40 PhD, masters, and undergraduate research students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, to successful completions. 

Prof Shultz has the rare distinction of having successfully translated his basic research findings into clinical studies. He now leads several large scale, internationally unique, multisite clinical studies in biomarkers and treatments for concussion, which is complemented by his innovative pre-clinical research program. This includes his $2 million NHMRC Ideas Grant-funded project which investigates brain injury following intimate partner violence, a critical area that has to date received little serious scientific research attention. 

“Professor Shultz is a hard working, innovative and insightful neuroscientist, who is well established as a national and international leader in the neurotrauma field,” said Professor Terence O’Brien, Head of Central Clinical School. “He has shown exceptional performance in terms of publications, grants, student supervision, mentoring, leadership and engagement within the University and wider community. His achievements have far exceeded our high expectations when we first recruited him as a ‘Star Recruit’ in 2017, even more impressive given the impacts on both his basic and clinical research programs of the COVID-19 restrictions over the last three years.”

Prof Shultz has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles, the majority of which are in his field’s leading journals. He has been invited to write review articles and editorials to many leading scientific journals, including Lancet Neurology, reflecting his standing internationally in his field. Based on expertscape.com, he is already ranked 14th in the world (1st in Australia) in terms of traumatic brain injury experts. 

He is engaged with community and sporting organisations relevant to his research, including the Victorian Amateur Football Association, and is a board member for the Australian Football League Players’ Association Health and Safety Steering Committee. He also participates on organising committees within the national and international scientific communities, including the Australian Neurotrauma and International Neurotrauma Society conferences. He also works closely with commercial pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including Incannex Health Care and Hit-IQ, in an expert advisory capacity regarding the development of new therapies for brain injury and other neurological diseases, and also assisting with contract research with his research group.