Team Research

To achieve optimal performance, athletes’ bodies and brains undergo enormous stress. Unless that stress is mitigated, long-term health can suffer. Athletic nutrition and training staff provide athletes with tools (nutrition, close monitoring, treatment, etc.) to aid recovery, but not all athletes utilize those tools fully. A healthy athlete can represent optimal human performance, but when injury or damage occurs, athletes also provide unique insights into recovery. In this pre-seed proposal, we address these two major challenges: 1) how to measure, promote, and optimize health and function in athletes, and 2) how to use insights generated from these athletes to promote long-term health in all persons. 

The Strategy 

We seek to form a Performance-Health Longevity (PHL) team to begin to meet our long-term goal, which is to develop and test new methods to measure human health and performance, ultimately leading to the creation of a new center. We will then advance these evidence-based methods to promote long-term physical and cognitive wellness via tools highly likely to be adopted by athletes, trainers, and eventually the general population. 

• We will begin by analyzing large data sets generated by athletic staff in nutrition, education, and sports medicine to understand health, wellness, and performance gaps (led by team members Shen, Courson), and strategies for improving adoption of existing tools (e.g., nutrition support) (Beer). 

• We will develop technologies from campus laboratories (Harth, Renzi-Hammond, Hammond, Schmidt, Lynall, Noble, Correia, Easley) to close these gaps and improve adoption. 

• We will measure success and iteratively adapt technologies with UGA’s Innovation District (Beer). 

• We will apply novel methods back to athletes and out to other populations, such as military personnel, Veterans, individuals recovering from injury, and older adults with chronic illness, to advance performance and health throughout the lifespan (all). 

This long-term goal is based on prior work with UGA Athletics, such as dietary supplementation studies for improving visual function (Harth, Renzi-Hammond, Hammond) and improving health and performance in athletes who have recovered from concussive injuries (Schmidt, Lynall). 

To meet these goals, in this pre-seed program, we will: 

1. Host a PHL team meeting to establish team member roles and identify a preliminary scope of work. This meeting will be facilitated by Renzi-Hammond, Schmidt, and Lynall, who completed UGA’s L2-IRT leading large teams program. This meeting will be hosted at UGA Athletics and will be attended by Dr. Ron Courson, the Executive Associate Athletic Director – Health & Performance, who worked previously with team members Harth, Hammond, Renzi-Hammond, Schmidt, and Lynall, on separate projects. 
2. Using pre-seed funds, the PHL Team will work collaboratively to review de-identified athletics data to generate preliminary insights on performance to support future, targeted external grant submissions. 
3. The team will use remaining funds to host an athletic PHL program summit to disseminate insights and align on next steps and a funding plan. 

These efforts will enable UGA to become a nationwide leader in health and performance research and leverage the knowledge gained to promote the long-term physical and cognitive health of all persons. 

Potential Grant Submission Opportunities 

• National Institutes of Health 

• High Risk, High-Reward Research Program, Transformative Research Award 

• BRAIN Initiative: New Concepts and Early-Stage Research for Recording and Modulation in the Nervous System 

• Department of Defense 

• Extramural Biomedical and Human Performance Research and Development 

• Defense Health Agency (DHA) Research and Development 

Team Lead

Harth, Jacob
jbh46589@uga.edu
College: Institute of Gerontology

Team Members

Renzi-Hammond, Lisa
lrenzi@uga.edu
College: College of Public Health
Department: Institute of Gerontology

Beer, Jenay
JENAY.BEER@uga.edu
College: College of Public Health
Department: Institute of Gerontology

Correia, Stephen
scorreia@uga.edu
College: College of Public Health
Department: Institute of Gerontology

Courson, Ron
rcourson@SPORTS.UGA.EDU
College: Mary Frances Early College of Education
Department: Kinesiology

Lynall, Rob
rlynall@uga.edu
College: Mary Frances Early College of Education
Department: Kinesiology

Scmidt, Julianne
schmidtj@uga.edu
College: Mary Frances Early College of Education
Department: Kinesiology

Noble, Emily
Emily.Noble@uga.edu
College: College of Family and Consumer Sciences
Department: Nutritional Sciences

Hammond, Billy
bhammond@uga.edu
College: Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Department: Psychology

Easley, Charles
cae25@uga.edu
College: College of Public Health
Department: Environmental Health Science

Shen, Ye
yeshen@uga.edu
College: College of Public Health
Department: Epidemiology and Biostatistics