John Dickinson 2.38 transcript

At the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, I am a Reader, which means that I perform research and my research area is in respiratory problems in athletes. I also lecture on the physiology modules within the School, so at the moment I am looking after the first-year physyiology and I run a third-year module in looking at how we can use sport science in applied settings and I also contribute to the Master's modules throughout the programme. So, all of our lecturers are research active, which means that they are doing original research pieces that are improving our knowledge around what we know around physical activity, sport and exercise. And the advantage to the students that come and study with us means that they are going to hear first hand, and from the researcher conducting the study, and a lot of the time they'll hear about the new things that are being found from the research before it is even published. Within the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, we have got a variety of different types of research projects. A lot of them are funded by external bodies and also companies, so we have grants from the Ministry of Defence, we have got from the World Anti-Doping Agency, we have got them from companies like A2 Milk and from charities like Asthma UK and all of this research falls under two banners, one is the Endurance Research Group and the other is the Sports Therapy, Physical Activity and Health Research Group. And ultimately we are providing research that is going to be of benefit to anyone interested in exercise and that could be from a health benefit through to improvement, optimising someone's performance. So, within the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, we really want to interact with our students and we do this in a variety of different ways. We have got our School society, which every student that is registered to the School is a member of, and that allows them to interact with the School, it allows them to put on events that they specifically want to see, so if they want to have a talk from a particular scientist or an athlete, we can help them arrange that, to organise residential visits to various places of interest such as particular sports science labs or venues that they might be interested in. We also have a Student Liaison Committee, which I chair which allows the student reps within each degree programme to come along with issues that might have  been raised by their fellow students and then we can make a difference with the students to improve their course and their experience of the course as we go through the programme.