Prof. dr. Rob Smeets

Prof. dr Rob J.E.M. Smeets (1964) is a physiatrist since 1995 and received his PhD in medicine in 2006 (effectiveness of different treatment modalities for chronic disabling low back pain and measuring performance). From 1995 until 2008 he worked as a physiatrist at Libra Rehabilitation and Audiology in Eindhoven. From may 2008 until may 2009 he worked as a research fellow at the George Institute of Global Health, affiliated with the University of Sydney, in Sydney, Australia. In June 2009 he was appointed full professor in Rehabilitation Medicine (0.4 fte) at Maastricht University (the Netherlands) and is working as physiatrist at CIR Clinics in Revalidatie (0.6) at Eindhoven. 

He specialized in the physical as well as cognitive behavioral treatments of chronic musculoskeletal pain and chronic fatigue patients and is responsible for the development, research and implementation of new diagnostic tools and treatments for these patients. He has successfully transferred the clinical department of Rehabilitation Medicine into an innovative academic working place and developed new diagnostic and treatment care pathways between primary and secondary care, especially in the field of musculoskeletal disorders. 

Other research topics are mediating and moderating processes and clinimetrics of outcome measures including performance tasks. He has been involved in several (inter)national guideline committees, (past) chair of the International Association of the Study of Pain (IASP) special interest group op Pain & Movement, chair of scientific working group of the Dutch Association of Rehabilitation Medicine (2011-2014), and member (till 2014) of the scientific committee of the 7th World Congress of World Institute of Pain (2014). He was chair of the workgroup Development of the Dutch Guideline Chronic Pain Rehabilitation which was published in 2024. He is internationally recognized in the area of musculoskeletal pain research as well as rehabilitation medicine. He has served >75 times as keynote, obtained >5.3 million Euro of grants and co(authored) >245 international peer reviewed articles. His work has been cited >24.000 times and has an H-index of 63 (Google Scholar). See: https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/en/persons/rob-smeets. 

He just recently published a series of 8 podcasts (‘Pijncast’ in Dutch) together with a colleague for health care providers about chronic pain and the role of psychosocial factors and how to address them (He has supervised 29 PhD’s and 5 postdocs and is currently supervising 6PhD’s. He is associate editor of European Journal of Physiotherapy.