Vivienne Fort is a chartered physiotherapist and the Chair of the Acupuncture Association of Chartered Physiotherapists (AACP). She has over 14 years experience working as a physiotherapist in the NHS and private practice, and has been the company director of her private physiotherapy practice in Peterborough for over ten years, which now employs six practitioners. Vivienne has recently stepped away from clinical practice to complete a PhD at the University of York, investigating acupuncture and manual therapy for low back pain.

One of the senior academic team in the Clinical Trials Unit of the Arthritis Research UK’s Primary Care Centre at Keele University, Nadine is a physiotherapist whose research focuses on musculoskeletal health in primary care. This includes clinical trials of interventions for common musculoskeletal problems. With more than £10 million research funding, she has contributed over 70 full paper publications and supervises MSc and PhD students. She is Director of the Clinical Trials Unit at Keele University and co-leads an annual short course on randomised clinical trials. Nadine is a member of national research funding committees (the HTA External Devices and Physical Therapy Panel) and the Arthritis Research UK’s Clinical Studies Group for Musculoskeletal Pain.

Richard Hammerschlag, PhD, was a biomedical researcher in neurobiology for 25 years, mainly at the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California, where he served as Associate Chair of the Division of Neurosciences. A long term interest in acupuncture and the unique challenges it poses for research led to a career change in the fall of 1999, when he accepted an offer to create a research department at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. During the following decade Dr. Hammerschlag coordinated collaborative research projects in acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine with Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research, Oregon Health & Science University, and the University of Arizona, funded by the NIH National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). His main interest in clinical trials of acupuncture has been to create research designs that adequately reflect clinical practice, most recently in the area called whole systems research. He was an invited speaker at the 1997 NIH Consensus Conference on Acupuncture, and co-edited Acupuncture Research: Strategies for Establishing an Evidence Base (Churchill Livingstone/Elsevier, 2007). He served, from 1997-2003, as co-president of the Society for Acupuncture Research and currently serves as a senior editor for the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. He retired in the fall of 2009 and became a Scholar with The Institute for Integrative Health, based in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hugh MacPherson trained as a practitioner of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine in the early 1980s and continues to practise in York. He subsequently founded the Northern College of Acupuncture, based in York, and steered the college towards achieving university validation for the first acupuncture degree course in the UK. As a result of his interest in research, he set up the Foundation for Research into Traditional Chinese Medicine and subsequently joined the Department of Health Sciences, University of York, as a senior research fellow. Hugh is currently supported by a Career Scientist Award and a Programme Grant for Applied Research, both from UK's National Institute for Health Research. His research includes conducting clinical trials and systematic reviews to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of acupuncture for a variety of conditions. He is the lead editor of the book, Acupuncture Research: Strategies for Building an Evidence Base, published by Elsevier.