Anna Hudson completed her doctorate at NeuRA and UNSW in 2010. With the support of a NHMRC Fellowship and a Lung Foundation Australia/Boehringer Ingelheim COPD Research Fellowship, she completed postdoctoral studies at Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris and NeuRA. She is now based at the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute Sleep Health (formerly the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health) as co-lead of the Sleep Apnoea & Respiratory Physiology theme.

Anna’s research aims to understand respiratory physiology and pathophysiology, for example in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and healthy ageing. She uses a multi-faceted approach to investigate the neural control of breathing, e.g. electromyography to assess respiratory muscle activity, electroencephalography to assess brain activity and respiratory sensation and ultrasound for respiratory muscle mechanics.

Anna is most well-known for single motor unit recordings from human respiratory muscles that implicate the spinal cord as the site of integration of multiple descending neural drives to the motoneurones. She established the ‘principle of motor unit recruitment by neuromechanical matching’, which is applicable to all movements we make and is relevant to the broader field of motor control.