UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Lise Gauvin, professor and vice dean of research at the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal, will present the lecture “Promoting Physical Activity and Healthy Eating Across Urban Contexts: Examples from Natural Experiments and Population-Based Surveys” from 3:05 to 4:20 p.m. April 20 in 110 Henderson Building on Penn State's University Park campus.
Gauvin’s talk is part of the Dorothy V. Harris Lecture Series in Sport Psychology hosted by the Department of Kinesiology in the College of Health and Human Development. It is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Gauvin is also researcher and associate scientific director for population health research at the Research Center of the University of Montreal Hospital Center.
Her current research projects include epidemiologic research into the determinants of physical activity and disordered eating, as well as population health intervention research to understand the reach and impact of programs and policies aimed at increasing physical activity and preventing disordered eating in the population.
In partnership with other colleagues, Gauvin also developed and validated a self-report instrument to tap into feeling states influenced by exercise — a measure that is now widely used in the field. She also led some of the first studies involving the application of real-time data capture to understand the determinants and outcomes of involvement in physical activity and of episodes of binge eating.
More recently, Gauvin used alternative designs including ecometrics, natural experiments, and population-based surveys to measure active living potential in urban neighborhoods and to ascertain population uptake of large scale interventions, including implementation of a public bicycle share program.
The Dorothy V. Harris Lecture Series in Sport Psychology honors Dorothy Harris, a Penn State alumna, past faculty member, and pioneer in the fields of sport psychology and women in sport. While at Penn State, Harris developed one of the first graduate programs in sport psychology in the country. Later, she became the first woman president of the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity. She received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Penn State in 1982, and in 2004, the Penn State Board of Trustees named a residence hall on the University Park campus in her honor. Begun in 1995, the lecture is presented annually in memory of Harris, who died in 1991.
The first year of the Harris lecture was 1995-96, and since then the series has hosted 20 distinguished speakers who are considered some of the leading figures in sport/exercise psychology.