Rate My Professor Lauren Sherar

Professor Lauren Sherar serves as Dean of the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences and Professor of Physical Activity and Public Health at Loughborough University. She graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a combined honours degree in Sport Science and Biology in 2001. She obtained her master’s degree in 2004 and doctoral degree in 2008 from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, specializing in physical activity and health with a focus on child and adolescent growth and development. Before joining Loughborough University as a Lecturer in Physical Activity and Public Health in 2012, she held positions as Research Fellow at the University of Bath from 2008 to 2010 and Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan from 2010 to 2012. Her academic career at Loughborough has progressed to her current leadership role as Dean, overseeing strategic, financial, and people management within the School.

Professor Sherar’s research specializations encompass device-assessed physical activity and sedentary behaviour, child growth and development, obesity, pragmatic public health interventions, and implementation science. She has contributed significantly to the field, with over 13,000 citations on Google Scholar. Key publications include “Moderate to vigorous physical activity and sedentary time and cardiometabolic risk factors in children and adolescents” (JAMA, 2012; cited over 1,640 times), “Standardized use of the terms ‘sedentary’ and ‘sedentary behaviours’” (2012; cited over 1,541 times), “Objectively measured physical activity and sedentary time in youth: the International children’s accelerometry database (ICAD)” (2015; cited over 1,076 times), and “Global prevalence of physical activity for children and adolescents” (2021; cited 297 times). She is a member of the International Children’s Accelerometry Database (ICAD) Working Group, ProPASS Working Group, NIHR Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Teams (PHIRST) LIGHT Team, and investigator on projects including Generation H, the Learning Network for Advanced Behavioural Data Analysis (LABDA), and the Leicestershire Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC). Her work emphasizes translating research into practice and policy to enhance physical activity and health outcomes, particularly in children and young people across schools, communities, and clinical settings.