2nd CLEAN SPORT INSIGHT FORUM

Jacco is 29 years old, born in Haarlem, the Netherlands,  is a recently retired professional badminton player, specialised in the men’s and mixed doubles discipline. 

During his career Jacco attended university and successfully finished his bachelor’s degree in Psychology and master’s degree specialising in Labour, Organisation and Health Psychology. He recently started working full-time for the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration in the field of change management. 

In 2016, following her success at the Rio Paralympics, she  placed fifth in the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year the highest placed female and Para athlete. 

Sophie was born two months prematurely with Cerebral Palsy and suffered from other health problems including jaundice, blood poisoning, a heart attack and a collapsed lung. Aged 6, she started riding for physiotherapy at the local Riding for the Disabled Association (RDA) group. She first competed at the Paralympics aged 16 and was the youngest athlete for Great Britain at the Athens Paralympics in 2004, coming away with an unexpected bronze medal. 

Not just an athlete, Sophie also graduated with a First Class Masters degree in mathematics from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2011 and now works as a software developer at investment bank, Goldman Sachs. 

As a PhD researcher Andrew investigates the psychosocial processes that facilitate the use of performance enhancing drugs at the University of Birmingham. This research includes doping in sport and exercise as well as cognitive enhancing drug use in education and is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 

Andrew graduated from the University of Oxford in medical sciences and has master’s degrees in business administration, psychology, and sport psychology. 

Exactly 5 years after the end of her sport career she found her mission in researching brain function (at U.S Navy Seals, Marines and Olympic athletes) and working in the field of performance psychology (psychology of optimal performance). 

After graduating from Berkeley University with a master’s degree in San Diego, Sara began working with young athletes, extreme athletes, pilots, musicians, and businesspeople and helping them perform optimally in stressful situations. 

Throughout his career, Ali has achieved the "career slam" of major championship medals (World champion 2014, 2x European Champion, and 2x Commonwealth Games Medallist) breaking World and European records along the way.

Throughout his career, he has been motivated to raise the athlete voice and help create a sporting system that truly puts athletes first. Through his athlete rep roles on the UKAD AC, ParalympicsGB AC, Global Athlete and Commonwealth Games board, Ali has given his time in helping athletes shape sport. 

Ali's true passion is anti-doping and the protection of clean athletes. Ali started a PhD into anti-doping in Para Sport at Birmingham University to help inform the system to create anti-doping policies that truly reflect Para Sport. 

In 2016 Patrick was Ireland's first ever representative in the Paralympic games in the discipline of Paracanoe.  Patrick finished 6th in the paralympic games.  He has qualified for the Paralympic games in Tokyo. Patrick's exposure to sport, chemistry knowledge and experience of Ireland's sport drug testing systems has led him to be a vocal advocate against drug use in sport.  He has given numerous interviews on this and was part of an athlete panel at Sport Ireland's Drug testing unit's report launch for 2017.  

He also integrated his chemistry and sport knowledge in a presentation to the Royal college of Surgeons in Nov 2016.  He has been nominated by the international Canoe federation and by sport Ireland for membership of the WADA athlete standing committee. 

Patrick O'Leary is a native of Cork, Ireland and has been working in the School of Chemistry as a lecturer since September 2004. His Previous studies include a Bachelors of Science (B.Sc, 1995) degree and a Ph.D from University College Cork. On completion of his Ph.D he was awarded the inaugural Post Doctoral Fellowship in The Sciences from the National University of Ireland in 1999 

Sue established the Protecting Sporting Integrity and Welfare (PROSPER) research team at LBU and over the last 15 years has led an internationally renowned programme of research examining the complexity of doping behaviours from multiple stakeholder perspectives. Examples of recently funded projects include two cross-cultural interventions to prevent doping in sport (RE>ACT and CoachMADE) and three EU Erasmus+ funded collaborative projects (FAIR, RESPECT and RESPECT-P). 

In readiness of the implementation of the WADA International Standard for Education, Sue and the PROSPER team are supporting anti-doping organisations to develop evidence and theory-informed anti-doping education plans and evaluation frameworks. 

Sue serves as a member of the WADA Social Science Research Panel, Convenes the British Association of Sport and Exercise Science Clean Sport Interest Group, provides expert guidance to the English Institute of Sport via its Technical Steering Panel and is co-founder of the Clean Sport Alliance. 

 Ian is an expert in moral development and use of image and performance enhancing drugs in sport and exercise. His research focuses on the investigation of psychosocial factors that influence moral behaviour and image and performance enhancing drug use in physical-activity contexts, as well as the prevalence of such behaviour across different contexts. 

Ian has extensive experience with quantitative and qualitative research, adopting different methodological approaches dependent on the research question/s being answered. 

He has received research funding from the European Commission, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee. Examples of recently funded projects include two Erasmus+ funded projects (RESPECT, RESPECT-P).

He is a member of the UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) Innovation Commission, and has recently produced content for UKAD’s Clean Sport Curriculum. 

 Prior to joining the University of Birmingham, Martin was a Researcher in Human Enhancement Drugs, based at Liverpool John Moores University and has been studying the use of Image and Performance Enhancing Drugs (IPEDs) since 2006.  

He has presented at both national and international conferences on a range of issues around IPED use, contributed to local and national government guidance on the provision of services for IPED clients, designed and delivered training for a wide range of professional audiences around the self-directed use of IPEDs and has provided expert witness testimony in a number of high profile cases involving anabolic steroids.    

Laurie has been working in this area since 2008, when she joined Prof Sue Backhouse to undertake a social science literature review for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). 

Since then, Laurie has spent most of her time driving forward a body of work, including her doctoral research, investigating coaches’ anti-doping roles and the factors that influence this. This research currently involves a WADA-funded project to develop an International Framework for Coach Anti-Doping Education (IFCADE), which will provide sporting and anti-doping organisations across the globe with guidance for developing, implementing and evaluating their coach anti-doping provision. 

Beyond this, Laurie’s recent work includes a number of funded, cross-national projects to evaluate education programmes, investigate doping in Paralympic sport and provide evidence-based guidance for the development of a whistleblower policy and framework. 

Andrea holds a Mercator Fellowship with University of Münster (Germany) and an adjunct position at ‘Foro Italico’ University of Rome (Italy); and serves as an advisor for the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK. She is a founding member of the Clean Sport Alliance (CSA). 

With a long-standing involvement in doping behaviour research, Andrea is a strong advocate for community involvement in anti-doping. Her current work focuses on developing a better understanding of clean sport behaviour, culturally and contextually relevant anti-doping education, methods for reliable prevalence estimations and evaluation of the effectiveness of anti-doping interventions. 

Since 2017, Andrea chairs the WADA Expert Group on Doping Prevalence. She also works closely with WADA on developing and improving the online educational tool ALPHA, its assessment, and the evaluation of anti-doping outreach activities at major Games. Her research has attracted funding from a wide range of sources, including WADA, the Medical Research Council, The British Academy, the International Olympic Committee and the European Council. 

Helen completed her PhD in 2018, focusing on interpersonal relationships within sport. Since then, Helen’s research has focused on understanding how these relationships can influence athletes’ doping decisions. Specifically, Helen's research aims to empower parents and coaches to fulfil their roles and responsibilities outlined in the WADA Code and provide them with effective and meaningful learning experiences. 

In 2019, she presented her research findings around the barriers and enablers to parent clean sport behaviours at "Play the Game" an International conference in Colorado, USA. Following this, she received funding from the International Olympic Committee to undertake a global systematic exploration of parent clean sport behaviours. Collectively, Helen’s expertise and background have aided the development of the UK Anti-Doping Parents Clean Sport Framework.