The people behind the knowledge
The work presented in this website has been co-authorised by some of the world top researchers in human movement science, skill acquisition and decision-making applications to Football. Here you can 'meet' them. Feel free to follow their work!
Bruno Travassos is Assistant Professor at Department of Sport Sciences at the University of Beira Interior, Portugal and a member of the group of performance analysis at CIDESD - Research Centre in Sports, Health Sciences and Human Development, Portugal. His research interests are in the area of game analysis and also on the development of decision-making behaviour of players with special emphasis in futsal and soccer. His current research explores the concept of representative design to better understand the effects of practice tasks in performance achievement and skill acquisition. He is also a futsal coach.
Ricardo Duarte recently finished his PhD in Sports Sciences in which he studied and developed tools to capture the Interpersonal Coordination tendencies of competing football players in different levels of game organization (from dyads to collectives). He is actually Professor of Football Coaching Methods and investigator in the Laboratory of Expertise in Sports at the Faculty of Human Kinetics, Portugal. He is also a consultant on Youth Football and Performance Analysis fields. His current research interests focus on the Behavioural Dynamics of Football Players and Teams from the perspective of Complex Systems, in which he is particularly interested in knowledge transfer.
Chris Button has been at the School of Physical Education since 2003. Previous roles have included the Director of the Human Performance Centre and the Co-Director of LINZ. He has held previous academic posts at Manchester Metropolitan University and Edinburgh University. As well as carrying out teaching and research, Chris has provided consultancy with several sports providing advice on Biomechanics and Skill Acquisition to the likes of Netball NZ, NZ Football, Motorsport NZ, and the Scottish senior national squads of Badminton, Rifle-Shooting and Golf. Recent work includes leading theoretical and practical workshops for the World Congress of Sport Psychology, Sport and Exercise Science New Zealand, Water Safety New Zealand and the Teaching Games for Understanding conferences. Chris is a current co-editor of the Open Sports Sciences Journal, an Associate Editor of the European Journal of Sport Science and an Editorial advisor for Sports Biomechanics. Chris lives on the Otago Peninsular in Careys Bay, with his wife Angela and daughter Melanie.
Vanda Correia works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Algarve in Faro (Portugal). In 2011 she finished her PhD in Sports Sciences at the Faculty of Human Kinetics of the Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal). Vanda’s research interests meet Sport Psychology, Ecological Psychology, and Sport Performance Analysis’s scopes of research. Specialized in the topic of decision-making in team sports, Vanda is particularly concerned on understanding how the dynamics of interactions between players and teams in field invasion games express goal-directed behaviours to satisfy performance constraints and how these adaptive behaviours are coupled to key information sources unfolding in the performance contexts.
Yaneer Bar-Yam is Founding President of the New England Complex Systems Institute. His research focuses on developing complex systems concepts and applying them to diverse areas of scientific inquiry and to major social problems. He has worked on fundamental properties of evolution and learning, the evolutionary origins of altruism and collective behaviors, the relationship between observations at different scales, the relationship of structure and function, information as a physical quantity, and quantitative properties of the complexity of real systems. Applications have been to social, biological and physical systems. Professor Bar-Yam has advised government agencies, non-governmental organizations and corporations about solving problems using principles and insights from complex systems science. He has been engaged in the education of complex systems concepts to academic, executive and professional audiences with over 2,000 graduates of his courses nationally and internationally.
Pedro Esteves is a Portuguese researcher at Faculty of Human Kinetics, Technical University of Lisbon, and a PE teacher in the Ministry of Education, Portugal. Recently, he has obtained his Ph.D. in Sports Science (2012), at the Faculty of Human Kinetics, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has been publishing scientific papers on ISI peer-review journals and book chapters, primarily in the areas of decision-making and interpersonal coordination in sports. He has also been coaching basketball teams and mentoring basketball training courses.
Keith Davids was appointed Head of School, Human Movement Studies in February 2006. He comes from the University of Otago where he was Dean of the School of Physical Education and Professor of Motor Control. He was a first-class honours graduate of the University of London and gained a PhD at the University of Leeds. Between 1993 and 1999, he led the Motor Control group at the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at the Manchester Metropolitan University, before being appointed the Department Research Coordinator. At the UK RAE 2001, the Department of Exercise and Sport Science gained a 5* rating, the highest possible award for research excellence. Currently, Professor Davids supervises doctoral students from Portugal, England, Germany, Wales, Singapore and New Zealand. He is also co-editor in chief of the International Journal of Sport Psychology and holds editorial board positions for the Journal of Sports Sciences, Infant Behavior and Development and the Psychology of Sport and Exercise. He is an Associate Editor for the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Duarte Araújo is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Human Kinetics – Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, where he directs the Laboratory of Sports Expertise. His research involves the study of the dynamics of expert decision-making, which led to him receiving the ECSS 2001 and ACAPS 2002 young researcher awards. He is a consultant for many different national sports associations, essentially about the training of individual (player, referee, coach) and collective decision-making in sports. He has written many articles and books about individual and team behaviours in sport, both in high quality scientific journals and in the popular press, and he has been invited to teach and to present his work on expert performance in sport in several countries.
Pedro Passos is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Human Kinetics/Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal. He attained his PhD in Sport Sciences in 2008. His research involves the study of the dynamics of interpersonal coordination in team sports, which led him to produce several papers accepted for publication in scientific journals, book chapters, as well as communications in scientific meetings. He currently maintains his research work regarding interpersonal coordination in social systems as team sports and extending the paradigm of analysis to video games cooperative tasks, searching for new methods of analysis and extending is collaborations with researchers in Portugal, across Europe, Australia and New Zealand. He supervises masters and doctorate students from Portugal. Parallel to research activity he was also the head coach of an Under-18 Rugby team. Currently he practices Mountain Bike, Surf and Alpine Ski.
Jorge Castelo is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Physical Education and Sports, Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies in Lisbon. His research interest has been focused on develop the theory and methodology of football training. He was an assistant football coach of some of the top portuguese clubs, such as S.L. Benfica, Sporting C.P and C.F. Os Belenenses. He is a coach education spectialist for the UEFA - Advanced and UEFA - Pro coaches certificate. He published several books and papers related to the dynamical principals of the game, the team cognitive model and the specific training methodology. He was also a commentator of football matches on the portuguese sport television.
Carlota Torrents, awarded PhD by the University of Barcelona, is teacher of Expressive Movement and Dance at the Catalan Institute for Physical Education (INEFC), University of Lleida. Her research is focused on creativity, expression and dance, mainly applying observational methodology as well as complex systems approach to study the influence of constraints in the crative behaviour of the performers. She was gymnast and currently she is dancer.