Rate My Professor Brett Smith

Professor Brett Smith is Professor of Disability and Physical Activity in the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Durham University, a position he has held since joining the institution in 2019 as Director of Research, a role he fulfilled until 2024. Previously, he was a Professor at Loughborough University and the University of Birmingham. Smith is a Fellow of the Durham Research Methods Centre and the Institute for Medical Humanities, and serves as Co-Lead of the Narrative Practices Lab in the Wellcome-funded £9m Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. His research specializations encompass disability, physical activity, co-production, and qualitative research, with expertise in narrative inquiry, rigor in qualitative methods, and arts-based research.

Smith authored the UK Chief Medical Officers’ Physical Activity Guidelines (2019) and led the first UK guidelines for physical activity among disabled adults (2018) and disabled children and young people (2022), co-produced with disabled people and organizations to establish new standards in communication. As Principal Investigator of the award-winning Moving Social Work project—a £1m+ transdisciplinary initiative with Disability Rights UK—he integrates physical activity into social work education and practice. He advises the UK Department of Health and Social Care, ParalympicsGB, Sport England, and the German Federal Ministry of Health. Consistently ranked among the Top 100 Cited Researchers worldwide in Sport Sciences, his key publications include the book Qualitative Research Methods in Sport, Exercise and Health: From Process to Product (Sparkes & Smith, 2013), the edited Routledge International Handbook of Sport Psychology (Schinke et al., 2016), and articles such as “Developing Rigor in Qualitative Research” (Smith, 2018) and “Co-production: A Resource to Guide Co-producing Research” (Smith et al., 2023). Smith founded and formerly edited Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, was past President of the International Society of Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise, serves on multiple editorial boards, guest-edited special issues, and is a REF2029 Panel Member for Unit 24 (Sport and Exercise Sciences, Leisure and Tourism). He delivers regular international keynotes and contributes to handbooks including the Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (6th Ed., 2024).