 My thanks go to the Brain Foundation and I'm accepting this award on behalf of a couple of other co-investigators. As David said, I'm at Royal North Shore Hospital and University of Sydney. I have a long interest in this research technique which I'll tell you about. My other collaborators are Professor Lynn Griffiths who is a neurogeneticist at Queensland University of Technology who has a well reputation with genetics and migraine and provides with some of the patients we'll be studying and those of my Masters of Philosophy students in UCheng. Happy birthday, Jim, and thank you for this grant that's named in your honour. Yes, sure. Professor Lancet, of course, is a luminary of Australian Neurology and has done a lot of research in headache and is an international reputation which is well deserved. This is an area which is relatively neglected, I think, in neurological education. I think you've heard a lot of worthy recipients here today for very many awards but I challenge you to perhaps think about the burden of migraine, one of the most common forms of headache. I'm a neurophysiologist of interest in neuromuscular diseases and ways of studying that and as part of my practice as well, I see a lot of headache patients and there's an interesting intersection that stirred my interest anyway in the pathophysiology of what's understood anyway of migraine but I need to take you back a little bit to the burden of migraine and how many people suffer from this. So there's a second most common neurological disorder and the global burden of disease in 2010 said it was the third most prevalent affecting some one billion people in the world. So the figures I kept in my head with that, there were around about one in six to eight women would suffer this and maybe one in 12 men but a recent Deloitte study that was commissioned studying our Australian population of 25 million people said 28.7% of women suffer from this, 11.7% of men. So this is of course from the milder forms to the more severe forms and that's like one in three women and one in eight men. That's five million people in a population now size of 25 million. So it really is a worthy area of study and this is a disease, well you call it a disease, it's so common but it won't kill you but it's certainly a very morbid condition which affects us in our most productive years of our lives up to the age of 65. It's often working age and 30 to 44 is probably our peak age and the most staggering figure that is Deloitte study said there's some 36 billion people, 36 billion dollars that it was costing Australia. Now I'm not an economist but GDP two years ago was about 1.7 trillion Australian dollars. Quick back of the envelope calculations is that's 2% of GDP and one third of this would be in health and one third of in productivity. So very, very important topic and not just for the patient's health but also for the carers have to look after them. So my study utilizes a subgroup of patients with migraine admittedly a lot less common but since the application for this grant we actually are going to expand this to look for patients with more severe form of migraine that's out there in the community. So the monogenic forms of those that are caused by certain genes and we know at the moment and we've defined of three different types. One's a calcium channelopathy and the other one belongs to a gene called ATP1A2 and the other one is a sodium channelopathy. And so there are a few of these people have been defined and dotted around Australia and we hope to see whether these patients can give us some insight along with the patients with common or more severe forms of migraine using this technique. We think several lines of evidence point to the fact that we have a hyper excitability of a relay station called the trigeminal cervical nucleus. So this nerve from the fifth cranial nerve is relaying information back from the pain brain structures of the head and neck and there's a theory that has evolved over time that this nerves are firing inappropriately and that's causing a chain reaction and central sensitization which is priming these people who may have a genetic load already. Maybe not the monogenic form but in the more sporadic forms as well to predispose them to have this disease. So many neurophysiological tests have looked at this and they include patients who have been studied for pain thresholds which are either mechanical stimuli over the face and head and neck regions. Patients have had flashes stimulating their their visual circuitry and also reflexes where whereby we can look at stimulating nerves around the head and neck region and looking at the muscle responses measured from the head and neck region. For some time now and while suffering PhD supervisor Professor Burke and other workers internationally in fact Sydney is an epicenter for this research looking at nerve excitability. So some of you may have heard it before nerve conduction studies is what a few of you may have actually experienced when we applied this in clinical testing but this is actually looking at a different parameter where we see how easily the nerve is stimulatable by producing giving the nerve a current in the wrist. So in this way we can non-invasively study how easily the nerve is excited and make deductions based on computer programs and modeling as to which iron channels and which pumps are actually disordered in this condition. So not only do we get an insight into the pathophysiology of this disease which has been applied to many other neurological and nerve conditions we also perhaps may be able to study what it's like and its effect with very many different drugs that have now been put forward for the treatment of migraine including some more recent ones that you may have heard of such as botulinum toxin and the monoclonal antibodies against CGRP. So in this way we hope it's some sort of biomarker that can perhaps tell us which patients are more likely to respond to these various therapies. So once again thank you to Brain Foundation for this generous grant.