Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting and Sleep consortium
ProPASS Early Career Researcher Awardees
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Early Career Researcher Awards of ProPASS consortium. The Awardees will have the chance to join ProPASS as collaborators.
Dr. Richard Pulsford
Richard is an early career researcher at University of Exeter (UK) with an interest in physical activity and sedentary behaviour epidemiology and behavioural measurement methodology. Richard studied BSc. Exercise and Sport Science and MSc. Exercise Physiology at Loughborough University (UK) before spending two years working on the first physical activity data collection using accelerometers within the Millennium Cohort Study, at University College London. He then completed a PhD at the University of Exeter (2014) using data from the Whitehall II Cohort Study to understand links between sedentary behaviour and both morbidity and mortality. Following his PhD, Richard was appointed to a faculty position within the University of Exeter’s School of Sport and Health Sciences to teach undergraduate and postgraduate students and continue to develop his research. His current research focus is on how we can capture precise patterns and distributions of habitual physical activity, how and why these patterns can vary, and what this means for health in both the general population and in clinical populations. Richard was also a member of the UK Chief Medical Officers Expert Working Group for the review of the UK public health guidelines for physical activity and sedentary behaviour in 2018.
Dr. Gregore Iven Mielke
Gregore received his BA in Physical Education (2010), and MSc (2012) and PhD in Epidemiology (2017) from the Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil. Currently, Gregore is a Research Fellow in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, The University of Queensland. With expertise in population-based cohort studies, his research is focused on physical activity and sedentary behaviour, with the goal of creating opportunities for improving public health. Gregore has been involved in a variety of cohort studies, including the HABITAT Study, the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (ALSWH) and the Pelotas (Brazil) Birth Cohort Studies. Before moving to Australia in 2018, Gregore had professional experience working on the Coordination of Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases Surveillance and Health Promotion in the Brazilian Ministry of Health. Gregore's research interest is in measuring and understanding inequalities in population health, particularly in relation to physical activity and sedentary behaviour.
Dr Li-Tang Tsai
Li-Tang Tsai was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She has a background in physical therapy and took both her master and PhD in Gerontology and Public Health, at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In 2017, she defended her thesis on “Walking, physical activity and life-space mobility among older people”, a work that included accelerometer-assessed physical activity among 174 community-dwelling Finnish older adults. In the same year, she was appointed as postdoctoral researcher in the University of Southern Denmark, where she managed the EU-funded PROMISS project (Prevention of Malnutrition in Senior Subjects in the EU) work package 2. Her main tasks and current research area include (1) harmonizing accelerometer data across five cohorts of older adults across Europe and USA; and (2) coordinating a lab study on 100 older adults (80+) to validate multiple accelerometers worn in different anatomical positions against energy expenditure measured by indirect calorimetry and double-labelled water. She has contributed to 13 papers in the field of gerontology, was awarded for best article by a PhD student from the Finnish Gerontology Research Center in 2016, presented in several international conferences and has been invited as guest lecturer in South Korea and Taiwan.