Profile

I’m originally from Wexford, a place on the southeast coast of Ireland, and I moved to Loughborough two years ago when I finished my PhD. I live in a village close to the town in the heart of the lovely Leicestershire countryside which means I’m close to the things I enjoy doing most – getting out and about in the outdoors, and riding horses.

I was always sporty in school and played a lot of hockey, and loved science and numbers. This triggered my interest in sport science, but I was also interested in physiotherapy. I just missed the grades I needed for physio so I packed my bags and set off for Limerick, Ireland’s sporting capital, to do sport science for four years. I then stayed to do my PhD there, which looked at how the muscles and tendons around our ankle joint behave during tasks like walking and running. In 2014 I moved to Loughborough and I’ve been here ever since.

I have had lots of great opportunities working in sport science such as working at Cardiff Metropolitan University for 8 months on a sprinting project with UCL, University of Cambridge and the Royal Veterinary College, working with Welsh Rugby and Irish Hockey, seeing the Munster and Irish rugby teams train beside my house in Limerick on a regular basis, and getting to travel to the US, Europe and Asia during my PhD to go to different conferences.

I work in a part of sport science called biomechanics, which focuses on understanding the physics of how we move. We work with athletes or teams to improve their performance, or ensure they don’t get injured. We also work with clinical populations, such as amputees or people recovering from stroke to understand how they move, and what we can do to maximise how well they can move. Our research and projects concentrate on measuring and changing things like someone’s position when they are doing a task or how they apply force. To do this, we use equipment like force plates (which like giant weighing scales), motion analysis (we stick lots of reflective dots on people so we can measure how they move), electromyography (where we put little sticky pads on people which allow us to measure the electrical activity of a muscle – this activity increases when we move), MRI (like what you might have seen in a hospital) and ultrasound (usually used to look at babies in the womb before they are born, but we use it to take pictures of the muscle and tendons of your legs as you move).

Biomechanists (scientists trained in biomechanics) work on lots of different projects; we often work closely with engineers designing sports equipment, or equipment for healthcare such as prosthetic limbs. The motion analysis we use is also used in the film industry! Do you remember Gollum from the Lord of the Rings, or Smaug the big dragon? The film industry really wants to improve how life-like computer generated images (CGI) in films look, and to do this they need to know how a body moves. Both of these films used motion analysis to record the facial movements and limb movements of humans, to make sure the CGI on screen looked as realistic as possible – a Dutch biomechanics professor, Ton van den Bogert won an Oscar for his work in this area.

I’m interested in knowing how and why we move the way we do. I want to know the forces on the body during movement, and how do we reduce them – we need some force for our muscles and bones to get stronger, but too much might break them! To move, lots of different muscles and tendons need to work together, but we still don’t really understand how – I want to know more about how this happens. This is important to people wanting to run as fast as possible, those recovering from injury/wanting to avoid injury, designing prosthetics for amputees and also for a new area of research called wearable robotics – where we try to design suits you can wear that give you a boost of power to keep you moving when you need it – like Iron-Man. I use different combinations of the equipment above to try to answer these questions.

Every day is different, and that’s one of the nice things about it. My job involves a combination of teaching students, doing research and working with groups outside the university to ensure that experiments we do in the lab have applications in the real-world and on people’s lives.

The teaching part of my job has given me the opportunity to teach on all sorts of degrees – sport science, sports technology, engineering, physiotherapy, podiatry! This part of the job requires not only teaching the class, but preparing for it, making sure the labs are ready for any practical classes the students will do, and meeting with any students who have questions. I also correct any in class assessments/tests or exams they do.

At this time of year, a typical day will start with teaching a class for 1-2 hours, I then meet with students working on different research projects to see how they are getting on and if they need any help. I would head to the lab for an hour or two to set-up for future experiments – this can involve a lot of problem-solving if the equipment misbehaves! After an early lunch I will then process some data and get some results, or write up results of other experiments. I would read what we call ‘journal articles’ for a while so I know what experiments are happening in other labs and what they have found. The afternoon might then be rounded off by meeting with an athlete, a sports medicine doctor or a group who are interested in the results of current projects, or who would like to start a new project. I try to squeeze in some exercise everyday so I would then head to an exercise class or the gym, then home for dinner. Drinking tea also features a lot during the day!