Michelle is a current Health Promotion consultant and senior clinical social worker for THS north. She began her practice in women’s services in 1994 after graduating from the University of Tasmania with honours. It was here that she first noticed the trajectory from people’s lived experience of historical adversity to the development of adult chronic disease. Her interest in the connection between trauma and health resulted in her shift to the health department space in the early 2000’s and her passion for the biology of recovery and healing continued to grow. In 2011 Michelle led a multidisciplinary team in the development of the award-winning Overcoming Pain and Living Life (OPALL) program which is now a trauma informed best practice program run by THS north through Primary Health services. Her work in the pain and recovery space led to the offer of a scholarship and she completed post graduate certification in pain science and rehabilitation through the University of South Australia in 2019. Michelle remains passionate about working at the interface between the biopsychosocial effects of adversity, immune responses leading to chronic inflammation and the impacts on motivations for self-management, healing and recovery. At 60 she sees herself as being in the last chapters of her formal working life but hopes to see THS services adopt trauma informed care as a best practice method for recovery before her retirement. One of the highlights of Michelle’s career was being asked to go to Papua New Guinea as a trainer for locals who were setting up the country’s very first crisis telephone service, for women and children torture and trauma victims. There she saw the extreme end of what happens when the biology of healing and the biology of trauma interface.