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The spring and summer months are often referred to as the ‘conference season’ among academics as this time of year generally coincides with fewer teaching-related commitments and (for those fortunate enough to have funds), the opportunity to present work at conferences. In the broad discipline areas aligned to physical activity, exercise and health there’s a lot of conferences to choose from to present research, to meet new and existing colleagues and collaborators, and to see what others in the field are doing. In June I was fortunate enough to attend a few very different conferences, symposia, and research presentations. The Read More

Earlier this week I spent an enjoyable day at Leeds Beckett University’s Carnegie School of Sport. I gave a workshop on using contemporary methods of processing and analysing accelerometer data, which was followed by a whistle-stop introduction to processing accelerometer data using the GGIR R package. Both presentations can be viewed as movie files here and here (around 5 minutes duration each). Following on from this I gave a seminar to staff and PGR students on the importance of partnership working in school-based physical activity intervention research. The talk used examples of my own experiences in West Lancashire and highlighted Read More

As research active academics two of the most significant and valued things we are judged on, are peer-reviewed research outputs and external research grant income. Both of these are products of many months (often years) of work, not to the mention the time taken to actually craft and write the respective submissions. Once we complete the papers/applications we send them off for review by expert peers in our field and to a large extent, the outcome is out of our hands. As one collaborator described it to me yesterday when referring to the outcome of grant applications, “it’s a lottery”. Read More