Sebastiano Nutarelli, Sports PT, PhD student (ACL rehab), MS (Biomechanics), Clinical Researcher, CSMS

About Sebastiano Nutarelli, Sports PT, PhD student (ACL rehab), MS (Biomechanics), Clinical Researcher, CSMS

Sebastiano was born in Turin, Italy, in 1980. Always into sports, he raced in BMX, played basketball as a playmaker in high school, and reached the national level in alpine skiing. He has been a private ski teacher and part of an agonistic ski team in the Turin area. He played as a striker in soccer teams related to the Parma Calcio until his twenties and in the B Italian League of 5 a side football/futsal with the Eurosporting Team. He was then won over by a full-speed career as a futsal referee, becoming a CAN-5 National referee in the A1-A2-B leagues in 2007, at 27 years old.

He studied ICT & digital communication as a multimedia systems designer, and from 2003 until 2007 worked for the 2nd most important Italian ICT company, within the HQ of Digital Communication, as a Web Accessibility Engineer. He specialized himself developing e-government web portals and becoming the web accessibility technical representative for people with various disabilities. He has been a teacher for web accessibility companies. In 2005 he became the 5th Italian member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2.0) working group, the international institution based in the U.S. that sets the web guidelines.

At 27 years old, at the peak of his professional and sports career, his life took a complete U-turn; due to a serious knee injury, he was forced to stop any activity for more than 4 years, in order to dedicate all his efforts to the recovery from knee arthrofibrosis, with many surgeries and daily PT 365 days a year. After several consultations with European knee experts, he moved to the U.S. for more than 1 year and a half, to become a patient of top-notch Orthopedic Surgery and Sports Medicine Rehabilitation Centres, mainly in Colorado and Florida, then briefly in California.

With this extended U.S. stay, he had the opportunity to directly experience the marked differences between the European and the U.S. clinical-rehabilitative approaches, with the chance to do such things directly with worldwide renowned surgeons and PTs, who later became mentors. This experience led him to pursue a new path once back on his feet.

He enrolled for a 4 years BSc in Physiotherapy in Lugano, Switzerland, and accomplished it with the highest grade point average (GPA) of his course. During his studies, he went back to the U.S in order to further expand his own educational development with the American approach, and on the whole, he carried out the following:
- Internship at the IRCCS, Istituto Ortopedico Galeazzi (Milan, Italy)
- Internship at Fisiosport (Minusio, Switzerland)
- PT and orthopaedic surgical observership at Cincinnati SportsMedicine & Orthopaedic Center - Dr. Noyes Knee Clinic (Cincinnati, OH - U.S.A.)
- Clinical rotation at TIRR Memorial Hermann - Texas Medical Center (Houston, TX - U.S.A.)

Since 2015, he has joined several surgical teams observing in the O.R. in Italy, Switzerland, and the U.S.

He completed a series of postgraduate specializations:
- Certificate of Advanced Studies in Sports Physiotherapy at SUPSI University (Lugano, Switzerland)
- Master's degree in Biomechanics at San Raffaele University (Rome, Italy)
- Postgraduate stand-alone 'Statistics in Health Research' module (part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care) c/o University of Oxford (UK)
- Certificate of Advanced Studies in 'Clinical Research (Clinical Trial Planning and Conduct)' c/o University of Basel (SUI)
- MET Medical Exercise Therapy Program (Holten Institute, Sweden)
- Strength & Conditioning Certificate (post-graduate training, UK)
- Sportsmetrics™ Certification program (certified Sportsmetrics™ instructor)

Furthermore, he's currently involved in the following postgraduate qualifications and research projects:
- PhD student at UCD / University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland) on the ACL rehabilitation of the knee

Sebastiano was the co-founder and President of the non-profit company NFC, which organized CPD courses for PTs & MDs in Italy, which he consecutively translated from English to Italian.
In 2017 he co-founded NOVAVIA Project, a company that acted in the field of professional Evidence-Based education (CPD courses, workshops, etc.) for MDs, PTs, and ATs mainly in Italy, Switzerland, and France. The organized courses involved the highest level of professors, physical therapists, and clinical researchers from all over the world, with Sebastiano acting as their interpreter from English to Italian and being the assistant to some of them during the teaching process.

In the summer of 2022, he became the Scientific Coordinator for all the CPD training projects in the 'SportsRehab/Medicine, Exercise, and Scientific Research' area for PhisioVit keeping up with the continuous effort to organize top-notch post-graduate professional training for healthcare professionals and athletic trainers.

He now teaches and co-teaches CPD courses himself all around the knee, lower limb muscular injuries, and injury risk reduction/rehabilitation in different countries.

He currently contributes as an Italian translator of rehabilitative guidelines and he's in the process of translating further scientific manuals - some of the translations are listed below:

- Derby Shoulder Instability Rehabilitation Programme (Derby Shoulder Unit, UK)
- Melbourne ACL Rehabilitation Guide 2.0 (Australia)
- Kinesiology of the Musculoskeletal System, Foundations for Rehabilitation, 3rd Edition (Prof. Dr. Donald Neumann - Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI - USA
- several internationally appreciated books/manuals in the MSK rehabilitation, Sportsmedicine, Strength & Conditioning fields due to an ongoing contract with a major Italian editor as Scientific Consultant and Coordinator of the English to Italian translation processes.

His university teaching assignments:
- from February 2018 to January 2019: associate professor in the BSc of Physiotherapy at L.U.de.S. Lugano Campus, Switzerland (Semmelweis University) - teaching "Kinesiology of the upper and lower limbs" & "Evidence-Based Physiotherapy in Orthopaedics 2"
- from February 2019 - ongoing: lecturer c/o ‘Sapienza' Università di Roma, Italy - teaching “Evidence-Based Practice & Orthopaedic Evidence-Based Rehabilitation”

Sebastiano also is a:
- member of the International Arthrofibrosis Association Board of Directors
- International Partner of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA)
- Swiss Physical Therapy Association (Physioswiss) member
- Swiss Sports Physiotherapy Association (Sportfisio) member
- International Society of Arthroscopy, Knee Surgery e Orthopaedic Sports Medicine (ISAKOS) Allied Specialty Member
- a KNEEguru contributor on knee rehabilitation (www.kneeguru.co.uk)

Sebastiano started practicing as a physical therapist in Switzerland at Fisiosport Minusio in the summer of 2017, then from August 2018 he also began working at the Centro Cantonale di Medicina dello Sport (CCMS) in Tenero and since the summer of 2018, he co-founded the Sports Rehab PT clinics along with his managing partner and Physical Therapist Andrea Balboni. Moreover, he was the team physio of the Swiss National Swimming Team for the Elite, Youth & Juniors teams, from 2018 to the Tokyo Olympics 2020 (2021 due to the pandemic).

Since the beginning of 2020, he started working as a part-time clinical researcher at the Clinical Research Orthopaedic & Traumatology Unit of the EOC Regional Hospital in Lugano.

In his non-stop idea to set up a center in Europe to actually help people dealing with knee arthrofibrosis, which plagued him eventually leading to his new life as a Physical Therapist, he developed the European Knee Arthrofibrosis Center kicking it off in 2022 (hosted in the Sports Rehab clinics), progressively training a staff of Physical Therapists and putting together a multidisciplinary team of skilled health professionals (and good people) genuinely willing to join the project (knee orthopaedic surgeons, pain specialists, rheumatologists, psychologists, nutritionists, medical & caregiver coaches, clinical & lab researchers, and so on).

Sebastiano is a strong supporter of Evidence-Based Practice in rehabilitation and he takes care of the standardization of the clinical practice within the Sports Rehab & European Knee Arthrofibrosis Center teams, sharing the guidelines and the constant updates, thanks to the exchanges with the international experts he's in contact with. He works with patients on a daily basis in order to help them in the process of recovery from an injury, whether they are professional athletes, "weekend warriors" or recreational.

Two are probably the current goals:

- building a clinical setting where patients of whatever social, athletic, or country origin can find a thick, skilled, and genuinely emphatic team; a group of professionals driven by real passion with no internal hierarchies, as seen in top-notch organizations in the U.S, as a patient first and later as a physiotherapist
- developing a path in scientific research with a practical effect over the PT clinical practice.