Your degree in optometry was the first you earned. In what way did you become interested in the human movement sciences?
Initially, I thought I would become a sport scientist because I was very interested in all kinds of sports, but I think I fell into the trap of believing that I needed to use my good grades to get into a good course at university. I'm from Australia and studying medicine is not a lottery like it is here. It's just whoever gets the highest grades, gets in. So, I went off and studied medicine for a while and then specialized in optometry. After that, I worked in a clinic but still had that strong interest in sport science. After a year I changed my mind and went back to university to study again. So, I did a second bachelor degree in human movement science. That's how I ended up in that position.
Was there a particular moment during your study that sparked your interest even further?
I had done the second bachelor study just out of interest. At the same time, I was working as a lecturer in Optometry. I was playing cricket with a teammate one day and he played incredibly well, a very good batter. Then the next day I had to test his vision and he was very short-sighted. I thought: “Wow, this is really strange. I wonder how good he would be if when we correct it”. As an experiment, I tried to blur the vision of him and other batters and actually found out that very little happened. We actually needed to make people basically legally blind before there was any decrease in their performance, which was quite a shock. This discovery made it to page three of the main newspaper in in Sydney. My name as a bachelor student was all over the media. I did a lot of radio interviews, which eventually led to me being approach by a few professors around the world.
So that was your first impact?
Absolutely. Although I never intended to do that. These professors were like: “Well, you really have to follow this up. This is really interesting.” That converted into my PhD.
Is that one of the reasons why you moved to the Netherlands after your PhD?
Oh no, there were two key reasons. First, I finished my PhD and decided I wanted to do a post doc. My supervisor said to me: “How about you go away and make a list of the top three places you think you should go to, and I’ll do the same?” So, we did and after a while we came back and talked about it. He said: “Which city is at the top of your list?” And I had Amsterdam and he said: “Oh, so do I. Then that’s settled.”
Why Amsterdam? Why not Paris, Rome or London?
Basically, we considered it to be the best place in the world for the specific research that I was doing in vision and skill learning in sport. One of my PhD assessors was also here in in the department, and he had some really good comments on my thesis, so I thought he would be good to work with. On a personal note, I met my wife in Australia and got married there, but her parents were living in Belgium. So, it was a good opportunity to be close by for a couple of years.
What kind of challenges did you encounter once you came here and tried to set up a project into something sustainable that could be useful for other peers, but also for society in itself?
From a project perspective I had written an NWO proposal under the assumption that I'd be using a particular piece of equipment (a virtual reality set-up). This is eleven years ago now, so it wasn't very common. It was a very new technology at the time, and I assumed I was going to use that for my research. We had a meeting with the company, but they wanted a certain amount of money from us to use their equipment. My boss said no, so I had no equipment to do the project I proposed. It was a frustrating moment, because I moved to the other side of the world to do the project and then found out it wasn't possible.
And how did you try to solve that? Did you approach other commercial partners?
No, I just decided to test some of the principles that we were aiming to look at in the project. For instance, is it possible to learn an interceptive motor skill such as hitting a ball when there is no actual ball there? In the end, we just used an Xbox Kinect for one of the studies to train people to play table tennis, and it turned out that it improved the real-world table tennis of those people. The Xbox was suitable because it had a sensor in front of the TV, and it would pick up kinematic movements. What you saw on the game responded to your movement. So, it had interactivity there, a form of virtual reality different to what we would think of it as now. I just tried to pivot into different ways to test some of the principles that I'd put forward in the proposal, but with different equipment.
One of the studies we wanted to see was whether visual motor behaviour in a virtual environment would be the same as in real life. In that study I tested some of the players from the national table tennis team. We had them playing against each other and playing against an Xbox Kinect and found that the visual and motor behaviours were very similar across the two environments. This reassured me that it was a valid approach.
What did you do with this data? Did you share it with the Dutch Table Tennis Federation?
It's funny. They weren't that interested in the study itself, but they were really interested in where their players were looking when playing. This is kind of one of the key principles for working in applied research, particularly in sport, is that the outcomes that are interesting to the coaches and athletes are often very different to the fundamental scientific hypothesis that I'm trying to test. In this case I wanted to know: does behaviour in a virtual environment represent that in real life? But the federation didn't care. They just wanted to know where do our players look when they're playing in a real table tennis game. Sure, you can test your hypothesis while they're playing VR as well. Sometimes you have to be flexible, otherwise you never reach your goals when working with teams like that.
Aren't you afraid for the criticism that people say you're manipulating your scientific data to give your client what he wants to hear?
That's an issue. If the sport organisation has questions they want answered, then that's fine. But if they have a question from which they only accept a specific answer, then that's an issue. For instance, working with a company who wants to show that their new training approach works. That's a tricky situation because you know they have a vested interest in what the result will be. But if I stick with that table tennis example. The coaches wanted to know where their players looked. It doesn't matter what the result is. They have a research question for themselves of where do our players look when playing. So, it doesn't matter what I bring back to them. They’re just interested in the question, not a specific answer.
Scientists who have done research the old fashion way still claim publishing your findings in an academic journal is the only to gain recognition and academic impact. But the new generation claim there are other ways as well, like putting your energy in a startup for instance. Do you agree with that, and if so, why?
My ideal model is to do both. Publication is still important to put results on the scientific record. Not every study can have societal impact. Sometimes you need to take a step back and uncover some more fundamental things. But for me, that has to be a means to an end for the longer term. I guess the three key areas for me firstly are changing sport practice, which means changing what athletes and coaches do. The second one is changing sport policy, so working with sport federations to change the way that for instance they would identify talent. And then the third one, probably about half of my work, is about changing sport rules. In particular I work with the International Paralympic Committee, where we create new rules for the Paralympic Games to make competition fairer for the athletes so that they compete against others with a similar level of impairment.
Speaking about the International Paralympic Committee, you are currently working as the Director of one of their Research and Development Centres. How did that happen?
It was through that kind of unexpected niche that I found myself in. Back when I was in Australia, before I moved to Amsterdam, I got invited by the Paralympic Committee to go to a meeting where they were trying to move towards an evidence-based system of classification for Paralympic sport. In the past you had these classes at the Paralympic Games that the athletes were placed into to compete against others with a similar impairment. But these classes were mainly made by people sitting at a table imagining what would be fair, without any scientific evidence to show that this was the best way to do it. The committee wanted to move towards an evidence-based system and started that process ten years ago, just after I'd moved to the Netherlands.
So, while I was here doing my post doc, they came to me and asked if I would set up one of three research and development centers to develop evidence-based classification systems. In my case, they wanted me to focus on systems for athletes with vision impairment. And I agreed to do it. The reason why they approached me was mainly because I had this very unique background of being an eye doctor combined with sport science. I guess I’m one of the few people around in the world who has that.
And how do you like it so far?
It's good fun. Good, because it is making direct impact on society. So, we create or change the rules that govern how athletes who gets to compete at the Paralympic Games and in what class they get to compete in. For instance, we had a researcher Kai Krabben who finished his PhD last year. He analyzed what the process should be for judo athletes with vision impairment. In his PhD he put forward a new system for classification which has been approved and accepted. This means that the competition of the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games will be changed based on the system that he developed during his PhD.
Wow, that is a huge impact!
Yeah, exactly. It's very rewarding in that sense for the research to make quick direct societal impact, but also to make competition fairer for people with impairments. At first, I was a bit hesitant to set it up because I hadn't really worked in that area before, nor with athletes with impairment. But yeah, it's been fantastic. At the end it was a really good decision.
Do you think that in this new role as a director you have more impact compared to a post doc researcher because you're now more on the side of policies and planning?
Having more authority certainly helps a lot. I'm still a researcher and I'm still responsible for this research center, so I don't really break it down. One would be useless without the other in some respect. But having that position helps in implementing the findings, that's for sure. But being in that role would be no use if we didn't have the research as well, so it goes hand in hand.
What kind of concrete recommendation would you give to the board of directors of VU Amsterdam to strengthen the validation and impact process and make academic knowledge accessible for everybody?
In the past all of these papers and grants were a non-negotiable part of your job. If it generated impact, then that was just something extra you decided to focus on but weren’t acknowledged for. I think now we're getting to the point of recognizing the fact that if you are a specialist in impact then these other things are going to be potentially a bit less important. Maybe there's less papers, maybe there's less grants, but it’s bringing these other things of value to the university as well.
I think someone like Erik Scherder is a very good example here. Would you accept his contribution to the faculty if he had less papers and less grants? Of course, because his TV appearances and promotions brings a lot to the VU and to our faculty. So, you need to extend that to others and say if we decide that the role of this person within the department is of one of impact, then we need to evaluate their contributions differently to someone who's only going purely for the NWO grants and academic publications. The message that we're very much getting now is that we need to have very tailored roles for people that suits their skills and their interests, rather than one-size-fits-all. And from my perspective, that’s a good thing. We need to be accountable for our contributions to society.
Is there any advice you have to the new generation of PhD and postdocs who are also interested in doing the kind of research that triggers impact?
Look for societally relevant questions. That doesn't come necessarily from bottom-up research. The way that we're used to studying a certain issue produced an outcome that raised a few questions. We then tried to answer those, which sometimes raised more questions and we tried to answer those as well. It’s an interesting process for me and maybe a couple of other researchers working in the same topic to find the truth. But I learnt from one of my supervisors that the research questions are already out there. You need to find them through speaking with coaches, athletes or even just watching the TV programmes where they're commenting on sport. So many questions and theories are out there, most of them are not even tested scientifically.
For example, athletes in baseball or cricket are always told to watch the ball and you see players telling themselves to watch the ball. I thought that's an interesting question. Does that actually make any difference if you tell yourself to watch the ball? This is how my research question was formed. You go and test the question. My point is: don't read books only. Go out in the neighbourhood, in the towns, in the society and ask people what their daily struggles are and then figure out how to solve them.