Overview
Our research focuses on understanding, enhancing, and sustaining human performance across a wide range of settings, from elite sport to everyday life. We investigate the physiological, psychological, and social factors that influence how people perform, recover, and thrive, with the ultimate goal of helping individuals and teams achieve their full potential.
This narrative draws on interdisciplinary expertise to explore performance in diverse contexts, including sports, tactical populations, healthcare professionals, workplaces, and creative fields. Our research is grounded in evidence, real-world application, and a commitment to improving wellbeing, efficiency, and resilience.
Key Research Themes
Optimising Physical and Cognitive Performance:
We study how humans can perform at their best across sports, tactical professions, and everyday life. This includes elite athletes, military and police personnel, and healthcare professionals, with research spanning training, recovery, resilience, and wellbeing.
Human-Technology Interaction and Applied Tools:
Our work explores how people interact with technology, ranging from wearable devices to digital systems, to support performance, safety, and learning across occupational and creative settings.
Function, Activity, and Health:
We investigate how physical activity, functional capacity, and wellbeing influence performance across the lifespan, including strategies to maintain independence, encourage inclusion, prevent injury, and support long-term health.
Creative, Business, and Occupational Performance:
We examine the drivers of creativity, innovation, leadership, and workplace performance, aiming to enhance productivity, collaboration, and problem-solving in professional and organisational contexts.
Featured projects
Our research spans laboratory studies, field interventions, and applied projects designed to enhance performance and functioning in real-world settings.
Explore a selection of current and recent projects below:
Biathlon prone shooting
An interdisciplinary assessment of biathlon prone shooting. In the winter sport of biathlon, which combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting, success depends on skiing speed, shooting accuracy and time spent on the shooting range.
Move Mojo
Creating Inclusive Physical Education for Children with Disabilities and enhancing human performance and functioning. This project focused on shifting mindsets, building confidence, and gathering evidence that inclusive PE can work in mainstream and SEND school settings.
CoARA project
Through this project, a coalition of internal stakeholders, including researchers at all career stages, have developed and strengthened the criteria, tools and procedures used in our academic framework. This will be piloted through our annual performance review exercise in 2025, after which we will evaluate the approach and embed the learning in other assessment activities.
Research centres
HSU Centre for Human Performance Research:
A multidisciplinary hub exploring the science of human performance, from elite athletes to occupational settings, bridging research and practice.
Latest Research News
Stay up to date with our discoveries, events and impact stories from across the HSU research community.
An innovation developed through HSU’s Centre for Osteopathic Research and Leadership (CORaL) has been selected by the World Health Organization as one of just 21 projects worldwide to feature at the WHO Global Summit.
In October, HSU was pleased to celebrate the publication of the Priorities for Osteopathic Care (PROCare) study in BMJ Open.
Earlier this week, we were pleased to welcome 13 new PhD students to Health Sciences University during our induction event.
We're proud to share exciting research from Professor Steven Vogel and Emeritus Professor Alan Breen at HSU, part of a unique longitudinal study examining how UK chiropractors, osteopaths and physiotherapists manage low back pain.
The Chiropractic Research Council (CRC) has gifted its funds to the new National Centre for Chiropractic Research (NCCR) based at Health Sciences University (HSU) and in partnership with London South Bank University, McTimoney College, Teesside University, and the University of South Wales.
