I’ve been a certified fitness instructor/personal trainer/healthy living instructor for over two decades. My practical and professional experience in the exercise arena pairs nicely with my research, like fine wine and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, Hans Solo and Chewbacca, or (insert your favorite iconic duo here).
Being a scholar-practitioner positions me perfectly to creatively translate research to practice through informal and formal field experiments. My research informs my practice, my practice informs my research, and best of all, I have the privilege of getting to interact with and understand the “user’s experience”—the perspectives of all the beautiful souls out there who have entrusted me with their most precious resources—their minds, bodies, and time.
Though my doctorate is in education and not medicine, I live by the same oath as physicians—primum, non nocere—first, do no harm. I take this phrase even more seriously as I dig deeper into the research literature and begin to understand the complex entanglement of a person’s physiological and psychological experience during exercise. There are practices we’ve come to accept as normative in exercise culture that, at best, may not be helping to increase population physical activity levels and, at worst, may be contributing to the problem. The heart of my scholar-practitioner work addresses finding innovative solutions to this problem of practice.
Stay tuned as I populate this site with my study, the findings, the teaching framework I created, and multimedia ways for you to interact with me! As Winnie the Pooh says to Piglet, “It’s always more fun with two!”