Graduate shines at BMS symposium

Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Science, Dr Jeanne Dekerle, and former BSc student Louise King, who graduated in 2014, travelled in April to the Australia Institute of Sport in Canberra to attend the XIIth symposium of Biomechanics and Medicine in Swimming.

The symposium takes place every four years and Jeanne first attended as a speaker in 2002 when she presented her work as a PhD student. She was invited back as a keynote speaker in 2006 when the symposium took place in Portugal and to France in 2010 to present research findings from a collaborative project with a French department as part of a funded Interreg IIIa project. 

In Canberra, Jeanne helped Louise presented her third-year dissertation project entitled Fatigue of the shoulder’s internal rotators following a 200-metre all-out swim.

On her return from Australia Jeanne said: “It was amazing to see Louise in front of an audience of so many well-known and highly respected experts in the field – one of the attendees was David Costill who co-wrote the textbook in Sport and Exercise Physiology!

“Louise was really nervous as she realised the day before her presentation how formal and professional the conference was, yet she didn’t  fade away and proved she could do it. Louise showed the audience what a graduate from one of our courses can achieve and she was complimented at the end of her presentation by the organisers who were really impressed. Louise became the ‘British star of the symposium’ and made me really proud of her, of our course and the team behind the scenes”.

A five-page article from Louise’s work has been published in the proceedings of the symposium and she will remain part of the history of Biomechanics and Medicine in Swimming. The next symposium should take place in Tsukuba in Japan in 2018 and Jeanne is already thinking of her future research!