Human Performance Research Centre

Distinguished Professor Aaron Coutts: The Human Performance Research Centre brings together expertise across the university to focus on issues relating to human performance. Our work improves health outcomes in providing the best available evidence to inform professional practice. We take a multidisciplinary approach to solving the problems that arise in our research.

Associate Professor Mark Watsford: The real world of sport science and working with professional teams enables us to get access to high quality athletes, and if we're looking at performance enhancement, we really want to be working with the best of the best. Building good industry partnerships really helps to get high quality research, and we bring a scientific rigour and a high-calibre research design to modify behaviours that can ultimately improve performance and potentially reduce that injury risk.

Dr Libby Pickering Rodriguez: If we've got athletes that are coming to us that want to know about how they're moving, how they might improve their technique or why they might be getting injured, we can help them out, so we could look at particular movements such as vertical jumping or bounding or sprinting, and through the magic of motion capture cameras and software, we're able to create a computer model of that person, so we can look at the way the person is moving at particular points of interest.

Distinguished Professor Aaron Coutts: Embedded research is a large part of the work that we do. We get the expertise from coaches, we take into account the values of the athletes in designing our programs, and then we get the best available evidence to match those problems.

Mitch Henderson: UTS and Rugby Australia are both housed in this building at the Moore Park precinct, where we also share the area with a lot of other sports teams and organisations such as the Sydney Swans, Sydney Roosters, and Cricket New South Wales. For me personally it means I'm able to conduct my research on elite athletes, which is the exact population that I'm trying to benefit.

Distinguished Prof Aaron Coutts: The students in our research centre are the heartbeat of the centre. They work with experts from a theoretical or framework perspective, but really they do the day-to-day work in the sporting organisations or in the lab. And being based at Moore Park really provides us a massive advantage in that we're several hundred metres from some leading sport institutions and organisations, and we're hoping to collaborate and partner with them extensively to produce evidence-based solutions to the problems that occur in high performance sport.

My name's Dr. Oscar Leatherman. I'm a lecturer in the Master of Clinical Exercise Physiology Program. I'm also a researcher. I became interested in the area of mental health when I was working as a clinician.

I started my career working in the public health sector, working with people who live with severe mental illness.

So schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other trauma and stress-related disorders.

My research area is really focusing on how we can integrate the benefits of physical activity into mental health services, and for people who live with mental illness in the community.

My program is really looking at how we can use research to advocate for more physical activity programs for those with mental illness, and also how we can adapt existing services so that it meets the needs of those service users.

Typically, there's a really long delay between research and translation into actual practice.

A lot of my work is really focusing on accelerating that time gap.

Really what we're trying to do there is demonstrate something that works and then advocate for more of these clinical programs to be rolled out and diversified across a number of different health settings.

A key reason why I chose to bring my research program here to UTS is because we've got an amazing team of academics across a range of clinical, sporting and other research domains, and so there's a real emphasis here on collaboration.

I was really excited to bring my program here and work with the team to see how we can evaluate and then improve mental health through the use of physical activity.

The greatest impacts of this research is that it not only translates what we know well within the community to mental health services, but it also looks at addressing mental health among community members in general.

That means that all people who are experiencing mental health challenges are going to benefit from the evidence that we're producing into this research.