Body
Ashley Craig, PhD, grew up in Sydney, Australia, in a closely connected middle-class family where his father was a master builder and his mother a legal secretary. Craig was always an excellent student and decided to major in physical sciences at the University of New South Wales. He tolerated his physics class but wasn’t crazy about analytical chemistry. Still, he was on track to graduate with honors when he realized the physical sciences wasn’t the path he wanted to pursue in life. He wanted to work as a health professional, so he added an undergraduate degree in psychology.
By the early 1980s, he was working as a hospital psychologist and pursuing a PhD when a friend casually mentioned that one of his relatives was in the same hospital recovering from a spinal cord injury(SCI). Craig had the freedom to choose what wards he worked in, so he stopped by the SCI unit. He was struck by the enormity of what the patients he met were dealing with, both physically and psychologically. Craig had found his calling: he would help people with SCI deal with their mental health challenges and rebuild their lives.
“The problems these people have are not due to childhood trauma, although that can play a role in it,” he says. “They’re ordinary people with a serious injury and impairment and they are struggling to adjust and be resilient.”
Forty years ago, most hospitals were entirely focused on the physical problems facing people with new spinal cord injuries. Craig soon realized that a large percentage of SCI patients were also dealing with the stress of living with SCI and were prone to problems like depression or panic attacks. He applied for and received a $300,000 grant from the Australian government to fund research into strategies that would help adults with SCI manage mental health and social challenges.
After receiving his PhD in 1985 while he was in his late 20s, Craig was teaching undergraduate psychology at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He worked his way up the academic ladder, achieving tenure in the 1990s while applying for grants and conducting rehabilitation research. But his busy teaching schedule and private clinical practice made it hard to fit everything in. In 2007, when he was an associate dean of science at UTS, Craig was approached by the University of Sydney, which offered him a position in its medical school. “From that point on, I was a fulltime researcher,” he says, even though he continued to see patients as well as supervise PhD students. In 2025, Craig became the head of the university’s John Walsh Centre for Rehabilitation Research.
Over the last 25 years, Craig has been a prolific investigator, receiving more than $50 million in competitive research funding and publishing over 400 papers, books and chapters. He has looked into everything from why people stutter to the psychophysiological effects of motor vehicle crashes. But his main area of research is the secondary conditions associated with traumatic injuries: mental health disorders, fatigue, pain, autonomic dysfunction and adjustment disorder. He has extensively investigated the neuropsychological impacts of spinal cord injuries on the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary functions like heart rate and blood pressure.
“We’re doing clinical trials trying to teach people with SCI strategies to stabilize their autonomic nervous system,” Craig says. “People with SCI have a great risk of dying from large uncontrolled variations in blood pressure, and we’re training people to use strategies like breathing to balance their nervous systems.”
Craig met Allen Heinemann, PhD, director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, at international conferences focusing on SCI rehabilitation and the two psychologists hit it off. When CROR was working on a grant proposal on comparing the length of inpatient rehabilitation hospital stays for SCI patients around the globe, Heinemann decided Craig was the right person to handle the Australia arm of the research, funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.
“Ashley is a highly published psychologist investigator whose work is cited frequently regarding SCI, injury recovery and quality of life dynamics,” Heinemann says. “He brings clinical insights to inform his research and is generous in sharing his knowledge and advice. We knew we wanted him on the team.”