Sport Sciences

Movement disorders and musculoskeletal injuries: many neurological and musculoskeletal disorders affect balance and movement coordination. We are currently examining the effect of exercise (in stroke survivors) and surgical techniques (in those with ligament injury) on functional abilities during recovery.

Three research areas are the foci of current and future research:-

• Global Sporting Cultures: a continuation of cross-cultural analyses of sport will see future papers drawing on research in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Liberia, Norway, Malta and Argentina.
• Fields and Visions: Research is currently being negotiated with colleagues in Germany and Cologne which seeks to examine the role of culture and neuro-linguistic programming in sports-related instruction.
• London Calling:The recent (August 2010) successful co-application for ESRC funding of £325,000 for a project that aims to examine the policing challenges and implications that hosting the 2012 Olympics will bring to London will be the primary research focus for the next 30 months.

Kelly's research focuses on:

• Choking and the proposed underlying mechanisms of self-consciousness and reinvestment
• Attentional control and performance disruption
• The use of secondary and priming tasks to alleviate performance disruption

Dan’s research interests began with his PhD programme, wherein he examined the emotional responses to music in young athletes; he collected affective, behavioural, and neuroimaging data in doing so. Although Dan has retained an active interest in the use of music in sport and exercise, as typified by his co-authorship of the 2012 BASES Expert Statement on the use of music in exercise, and his continued supervision of PhD students in the area, he has recently been integrally involved in the examination of the neural bases for expert-novice differences in anticipation skill, using fMRI technology; he is a member of the Centre for Cognition and Neuroimaging and an Authorised User of the co-owned MRI scanner based at the Combined Universities Brain Imaging Centre (CUBIC) to this end.

Dan’s current research interests have stemmed from this examination of perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport, to the investigation of crossmodal attention – most notably the effects of concurrently presenting information not only visually, but also in auditory and/or kinaesthetic modalities. He is also working collaboratively with colleagues at Brunel to examine the changes that occur during skill acquisition via action observation.

Susan’s major research interest is in the development of student (and newly qualified) physical education teachers. There are two related themes to this work: (i) student teachers development over the course of their initial teacher education programme, particularly the development of their knowledge for teaching; and (ii) roles and responsibilities of partners in secondary physical education teacher education programmes in supporting student teachers' development. Both of these two main research areas are supported by external funding.

Richard’s main research interests are in growth hormone (GH) in sport and exercise, that is the misuse of GH in sport but in particular the body’s (endogenous) GH response to exercise. Other research interests include exercise and sports performance and, increasingly, exercise and health. His teaching interests include all aspects of physiology generally, and specifically physiology related to sport, exercise and health.

Sara has been involved in a wealth of research projects with the Biomechanics research team. She has a particular interest in the biomechanics of sports injuries and sports shoes.

Robin’s research is in two areas: (1) the attentional processes underlying skill failure or ‘choking’, and (2) anticipation skill and susceptibility to deception. His interest in ‘choking’ focuses on the reinvestment or explicit monitoring theory and examines individual differences associated with choking, and whether reinvestment theory also applies to decision making in sport. His work on anticipation skill focuses on identifying the information to which experts are attuned (e.g., by using temporal and spatial occlusion paradigms, and comparing full video with point-light display formats), and the implications of this research for deception in sport. Recently, Robin completed an RGC-funded collaborative project with Prof Bruce Abernethy (University of Queensland) and Prof Michael Wright (Brunel University) that used fMRI to identify brain regions associated with anticipation skill in sport.

Costas has completed a number of industrial projects that include work with Nike Inc. on the Portable Sport Audio MP3 player, Sony UK on the W series of sport MP3 headphones, Bio-Medical Research Ltd. (Ireland) on the Mentor behavioural screening programme and David Lloyd Leisure Ltd on the development of a music policy for their chain of health clubs. He was principal author of the recent British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences’ (BASES) national expert statement on the use of music in exercise.

From 2007-10 Costas led a large-scale consultancy project with the International Management Group (IMG) that entailed coordinating live music with mass participation running events – Run to the Beat. He made scientific contributions and served as a media spokesperson for several events in the UK and across mainland Europe. Most recently he has been working with Redbull UK Ltd. on the Performance Track Project that has entailed the creation of a bespoke pre-competition track for GB athlete Dai Green. The project has involved a collaboration with the well-known producer Redlight.

Costas has worked extensively with the music industry to release a number of sport and exercise-related compilations including the bestselling Run to the Beat CD and Ministry of Sound: Run to the Beat 2010. He recently completed a textbook entitled Inside Sport Psychology (Human Kinetics 2011) that is co-authored by Prof Peter Terry (University of Southern Queensland). This is the first book to cover music-related psychological interventions in sport.

Costas contributed three chapters to the text Sporting Sounds: Relationships Between Sport and Music (Routledge 2009) as well as chapters in Sport and Exercise Psychology (Hodder Education 2008) and New Sport and Exercise Psychology Companion (Fitness Information Technology 2011), and Sport, Music, Identities (Taylor & Francis 2014).

I joined the School of Sport and Education at Brunel in September 2010 after several years as a sports academic at Loughborough University. I am a multi-disciplinary social scientist who has been working in sport and leisure research since the 1980s. My primary focus is on the experiences of individuals and social groups, and much of my work addresses aspects of disadvantage and exclusion - initially in the UK and Europe, and more recently in international development contexts. Over the course of my career I have had the opportunity to undertake a broad range of sports research, and also to participate in a wider range of studies within the social sciences. This has included several years working in comparative European social policy research, and also longstanding involvement in the international leisure studies research community. The majority of my research reflects this background, and addresses social policy agendas that stretch beyond sport to include issues such as multiculturalism, health and well-being, and education. I enjoy the opportunity to work with academics and policymakers in multidisciplinary collaborations to address research issues within and around sport.

For the last six years my primary focus has been on youth sport, including analysis of young people’s sport in the context of their family circumstances. I have led more than 30 projects in the area of young people and physical activity, youth sport volunteering, girls and sport, sport and youth inclusion, and support for talented young performers, and have undertaken a number of national and international evaluations for policymakers. These projects have been undertaken for a wide range of funding agencies including national sports agencies, government departments and commercial sponsors - e.g. the Department for Education, the Department of Culture Media and Sport, Youth Sport Trust, the European Social Fund, Nike, sportscotland, Sport England and UK Sport. Within youth sport my personal specialist areas are (i) sport and family, (ii) sport, poverty and exclusion, and (iii) sport and international development. Since 2007 I have been especially involved in researching the use of sport in international development contexts, and have received more than £300,000 from UK Sport, British Council, UNICEF and the European Union for research in Brazil, India, the West Indies and Zambia. As with my UK and European research, my focus is on sport within its wider context, including whether and how sport can contribute to the Millennium Development Goals of raising education levels, addressing gender inequity, and countering the HIV-AIDS pandemic.

• Choking and the proposed underlying mechanisms of explicit monitoring and distraction theories
• Attentional control and performance disruption
• The role of working memory and task complexity in performance under conditions of high and low pressure.

Pascale’s main research interest lies in the understanding of the pathophysiology of respiratory disorders in athletes. It encompasses disorders such as asthma, expiratory flow limitation and exercise-induced hypoxemia. Her research activities include relatively large as well as intervention studies in healthy trained or untrained individuals, athletes with respiratory disorders and asthmatic patients.

• Impact of organisational culture on sport experiences
• Women and young peoples' sport participation
  

Alison’s research focuses on the organisational and cultural dimensions of sport, and the influence this has on coaching policy and practice. She has used her research examining the impact of organisational culture on the coach-athlete relationship in elite sport to inform changes to women’s experience in elite sport and the disconnected nature of coach-athlete relationships.

She has worked on a number of funded interdisciplinary projects related to this interest including:  the Football Association Mixed Gender project, which examined the social, physical and psychological issues surrounding increasing the age of mixed gender football from 11 to 14; and a StreetGames, UsGirls project examining the inequalities, participation and experiences of women and girls aged 16-25 on UK Sport funded UsGirls doorstep sport programmes.  

 Publications

Journal Papers

Maitland, A. and Gervis, M. (2010).  Goal setting in youth football.  Are coaches missing an opportunity? Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 15, 323-343.

Conference Papers

Maitland, A., Hills, L., & Rhind. D. (2012). Impact of an organisational culture on coach-athlete relationships. Pre-Olympic International Convention on Science, Education and Medicine in Sport. Glasgow, UK

Maitland, A. (2011). Organisational cultural communication in elite rowing spaces. Leisure Studies Association Conference, Southampton Solent University, UK.

Maitland, A. (2010). What is missing from goal-setting? 6th ICCE Continental Coach Conference, Arnhem, Netherlands.

Research Centre: Brunel Centre for Sport Health and Wellbeing

Alison's research interests are firmly focused upon understanding potential respiratory limitations to exercise tolerance and performance. This encompasses aspects of respiratory pathophysiology (e.g., asthma), respiratory mechanics, respiratory effort perception, muscle physiology and cardiovascular reflex control. These interests characterise her as a whole-body, integrative human physiologist.

In particular, Alison has pioneered research into the influence of inspiratory muscle training and fatigue upon exercise tolerance and performance. She has an international research profile in this area, having published some of the 'key' papers on inspiratory muscle training and fatigue. Her expertise on inspiratory muscle training and assessment has resulted in a number of international collaborations with both sport scientists and clinicians. Specifically, she has published with Dr Paltiel Weiner at the Hillel-Yaffe Medical Center, Hadera, Israel, Dr Tim Mickleborough at the University of Indiana, USA, Dr Andrew Kilding at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, and Dr Simon Brumagne at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Alison is also collaborating with Prof Rik Gosselink of the University of Leuven, and an international team of clinicians, on a multi-centre trial of inspiratory muscle training in patients with asthma. 

Daniel’s main research focuses on understanding the development and maintenance of (un)healthy and (in)effective relationships in sport. This relates to all of the key stakeholders including athletes/players, coaches, referees and parents. It is intended that this research informs policy and practice to promote the welfare of everyone involved and safeguard people with additional vulnerability in sport.

Current/recent research projects include:

• Preventing sexual harassment and abuse in sport (European Commission)
• Understanding player wellbeing in elite junior tennis (International Tennis Federation)
• Developing a child protection in sport system in Japan (Daiwa Foundation)

PhD Students:

• Celena Dell – Experiences of football referees (The Football Association)
• Alison Maitland – Organizational culture and the coach-athlete relationship in elite rowing
• Georgia Allen – Developing life skills through youth sport
• Lisa Taylor – Teacher expectations in Physical Education

Dr Romer has published extensively in the area of exercise physiology, with particular emphasis on the cardiorespiratory responses/interactions/limitations to exercise and other stressors in health and disease. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on topics related to this area and been invited to write scholarly reviews for prestigious journals. He has produced more than 10 invited book chapters, including several for leading national and international organisations (e.g., British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences, International Society for Advancement of Kinanthropometry, International Olympic Committee, American College of Sports Medicine). His research has been supported by external agencies, including UK Sport, ParalympicsGB, Integrated Spinal Rehabilitation Foundation, The Royal Society and The Nuffield Foundation, amongst others.

Dr Romer has an external profile through involvement with national and international organisations, including the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences, the European College of Sport Science, the American College of Sports Medicine, The Physiological Society, and the European Respiratory Society. He has authored and presented numerous abstracts at internationally-recognised conferences and has given numerous invited conference addresses, including several keynotes. He is a Fellow of both the American College of Sports Medicine and the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences. Furthermore, he serves as a Section Editor for the European Journal of Sport Science and as a Review Editor for both the European Journal of Applied Physiology and Frontiers in Respiratory Physiology.

• Sport Sociology and Sport Development (in particular policy and socio-legal issues in sport)
• Islam and Islamophobia
• Socio-Psychological aspects of Deviance
• Policing
• Fascism, Neo-Fascism and Populist Movements
• Italian society/ politics

His recent book publication is:

Testa, A. and Armstrong, G. (November 2010). Football, Fascism and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football, A&C (Bloomsbury), London, Black Publishers.