Kim Edwards
Course Director, Sports and Exercise Medicine, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences
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Biography
I am the Course Director for the MSc in Sport and Exercise Medicine. My main roles are to oversee the smooth running of the MSc programme and develop/expand the course to retain its place as the market leader in this field in the UK. I also manage and deliver the Research Methods module and the Project and Dissertation module to ensure the highest possible standard of research output. I mark assessments/conduct viva voce examinations for the course, supervise MSc and PhD students, and provides academic and pastoral support to MSc students. Thus I have a broad knowledge of University processes, assessment and delivery of teaching, and innovative approaches to teaching and learning. I previously worked at University of Leeds as a lecturer and before that I worked in Corporate Banking (debt finance) in London for twelve years for various banks, culminating as a vice president for JPMorgan Chase Bank. This gives me a wide and diverse set of skills to draw on for research and teaching.
Teaching Summary
I manage and deliver the Research Methods module for MSc Sport and Exercise Medicine, MSc physiology, and MSc Neuroimaging students. This module aims to teach students that they can do their own… read more
Research Summary
My research examines the association between physical activity and health.
Examples of recent work include, investigating food outlet location and fast food consumption to obesity in children and adults; considering the relationship between physical activity, access to green spaces, and obesity; developing and piloting a new physical activity questionnaire for use in clinics; injury surveillance work for multi-day adventure races; examining physical activity levels in school children and the relationship with socio-economic group; describing the relationship between physical activity, asthma severity and quality of life; investigating the relationship between diet, and diet cost, and risk of breast cancer; examining the relationship between diet, physical activity and obesity in children using SenseCam.
I also have an interest in spatial analyses techniques and in developing and testing spatial microsimulation models. I have applied these models to successfully estimate various data, including physical activity behaviour and adult obesity.
I manage and deliver the Research Methods module for MSc Sport and Exercise Medicine, MSc physiology, and MSc Neuroimaging students. This module aims to teach students that they can do their own statistics for their research projects, teaching them the key principles and how to apply them to their research. It is delivered in a flexible e-learning format to enable students to learn at their own pace.
I also manage Project and Dissertation module for MSc Sport and Exercise Medicine. It is vital to me that students undertake a piece of research in an area of interest to them, so we spend a lot of time in the first term exploring the options with students - matching the right students, to the right project, to the right supervisor. This together with the research methods taught module esures we achieve the highest possible standard of research output and many of our students publish their research.
Past Research
Modern environments do not necessarily encourage residents to have an active, healthy lifestyle. In fact, the sedentary option is often the easiest choice. Accordingly my research regarding the obesogenic environment has lead me to examine the relationship between obesity and many different aspects of the environment, including access to facilities, urbanisation, social capital, deprivation, and neighbourhood safety, as well as many behavioural aspects, such as physical activity levels, sedentary behaviour, diet in terms of consumption and expenditure.
As part of my PhD I developed SimObesity, a deterministic spatial microsimulation model that can be used to estimate health data, such as obesity prevalence or physical activity levels. Please get in touch if you would like to use a version.