Programme > Keynote Speakers

Plenary sessions

Keynote 1

Dr. King serves as Professor and Vice Chair for Academic Affairs of Epidemiology & Population Health and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and is founder and Faculty Director of the Our Voice Citizen Science Initiative and Global Network. Recipient of the Outstanding Scientific Contributions in Health Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association, her research focuses on the development, evaluation, and translation of public health interventions to reduce chronic disease and its key behavioral risk factors. She uses state-of-the-art communication technologies, community-based participatory research perspectives, and citizen science approaches to address health disparities among disadvantaged populations worldwide. Dr. King has served on a number of government taskforces in the U.S. and abroad, including membership on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Scientific Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2020. She co-chaired the USDHHS 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans Advisory Committee and was one of 10 U.S. scientists honored by the Association of American Medical Colleges in 2014 for outstanding research targeting health inequities. She served as President of the Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM) from 2011-2012. Her research on citizen science to promote healthy environments for all has been honored with an international excellence award in addition to Stanford Medical School’s inaugural faculty community engagement award and SBM’s 2018 Research to Practice Award. She received the International Society of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity’s inaugural lifetime achievement award in 2019, the Society of Behavioral Medicine’s Distinguished Scientist Award in 2020. In 2021 she and her team were honored with Stanford School of Medicine’s Integrated Strategic Plan (ISP) Star Award and in 2022 she received Stanford University’s Miriam Aaron Roland Prize for her community-facing Our Voice Initiative combining scholarship with public service.   

Title of HEPA 2022 Keynote presentation: Leveraging Citizen Science as part of an Ecosystem Approach to Health-Enhancing Physical Activity.

Description of HEPA 2022 Keynote presentation: During the past 50 years, the positive effects of health-enhancing physical activity have continued to expand exponentially; yet many populations worldwide remain insufficiently active and, thus, unable to fully realize the benefits that regular physical activity offers. While a substantial number of evidence-based physical activity interventions have been successfully tested, few have specifically targeted the local environmental contexts that have a key impact on daily physical activity levels across the life course. A major focus of this presentation is to describe a technology-enabled participatory research model, called the Our Voice global citizen science research initiative, which actively engages community residents worldwide in assessing, analyzing, and building practical solutions to local environmental barriers to health-enhancing physical activity. Current results of Our Voice projects, which span six continents and have included residents ages 9 to 90, indicate that community residents themselves, irrespective of circumstances, age, or culture, may in fact be the planet’s most valuable “renewable resource” for helping to change local environments for active and healthy living.

Keynote 2

Audrey de Nazelle is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London. Her work, at the intersection of environmental sciences, health behavior, transportation, and urban planning, aims at guiding decision makers towards health-promoting built environments and policies. Much of her research has been on the relationships between active travel and air pollution (exposures, health risks and benefits, and societal engagement). Dr de Nazelle holds a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Environmental Sciences, a Maîtrise in Mathematics from the University of Paris VI Pierre et Marie Curie, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (now ISGLOBAL), Barcelona, Spain. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/anazelle 

Title of HEPA 2022 Keynote presentation: Physical activity, air pollution, and much more: the case for systems thinking in urban policies.

Description of HEPA 2022 Keynote presentation: Physical activity may be one of greatest benefits of active travel -however there are many more, and in some cases there could be some trade-offs too. Yet, we create disjointed targets, campaigns and regulations to tackle in siloed and often piecemeal approaches major urban health and environmental challenges such as climate change, physical inactivity, air pollution, traffic injuries, social isolation, stress, inequalities, etc. The way we address these problems matters, and this lack of joined up thinking is a wasted opportunity. If we let the promotion of a healthier, more sustainable and resilient society be the goal of our policies rather than merely compliance with singularly focused standards and targets, we will find different types of solutions emerge as most advantageous. For example, in addition to providing a seamless way to integrate physical activity into daily routines, walking and cycling can be a convenient and low-cost alternatives to driving, thus reducing air pollution, green house gas emissions and noise; the infrastructure and urban design features conducive to walking and cycling may in turn have further benefits, such as traffic safety and greenspace exposure; etc.. Evidence on benefits, co-benefits, and trade-offs of different types of urban policies that tackle some of our greatest urban health challenges jointly will be presented, making the case for holistic approaches to urban policy decision making, particularly through urban planning and design strategies. We will end by discussing avenues for greater integration of health in urban decision making.

Keynote 3

Andreas Holtermann has a master and PhD in Human Movement Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. Since 2008, he has been holding positions as Post-doc, Senior researcher, and currently Professor at the National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Copenhagen, Denmark. Andreas has published more than 250 papers in international peer reviewed journals, supervised 15 PhD theses, and given numerous invited lectures at international conferences and seminars. His main field of research is on occupational physical activity and health. His background in Human Movement Science gave him the understanding of how physical activity can promote health. When starting the post-doc in an occupational research institute, he became aware of and very interested in, how it can be that several occupational groups (e.g. cleaners, manufacturing workers, elderly care) are highly physically active for many hours per day at work, but still have a poor cardiorespiratory fitness and health. He started investigating in prospective cohort studies and workplace interventions how it can be that while leisure time physical activity is so beneficial for health, the physical activity performed as a part of the job does not seems to give the same health benefits. He termed this phenomena on the contrasting effects of physical activity during work and leisure on various health outcomes, like cardiovascular disease, sickness absence and mortality as the “Physical health paradox”. Recently, he has worked on “the Goldilocks Work Principle” of how physical activity during productive work can be designed in different jobs to be “just right” (not too much or too less of physical activity and sedentary time) for directly promoting health, physical fitness and well-being of workers in various jobs. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andreas_Holtermann

Title of HEPA 2022 Keynote presentation: Are all physical activity health-enhancing? On the Physical Activity Paradox?

Description of HEPA 2022 Keynote presentation: We know that physical activity is among the best investments for well-being and health. It’s beyond doubt that physical activity during leisure time promotes health. But, how can it then be that blue collar workers being physically active for several hours each working day – often walking more than 10,000 steps during working hours alone – have such poor fitness and health? Yes indeed, blue collar workers often have less beneficial lifestyle factors, but can it explain it all? Can it be that the physical activity performed as a productive work demand during working hours not provides the same health benefits as when performed during leisure time, termed the “Physical Activity Paradox”?

In my talk, I will present the background, findings and explanations for the Physical Activity Paradox. I will discuss if physical activity during productive work can be designed so workers get fit and healthy by performing their job (defined as the Goldilocks Work Principle). I will address the need for improving collaboration, common understanding and recommendations regarding physical activity at work and leisure. I will end up with, the need for a systemic population-based approach integrating work and leisure physical activity for particularly reaching blue-collar lower-socioeconomic groups. 

Keynote 4

Pr. Irène Margaritis is currently Assistant Director for Food safety & nutrition, animal & plant health in the Risk Assessment Department of the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (Anses) and previsoulsy Head of Nutritional Risk Assessment involoved in the French scientific interdisciplinary expertise covering physical activity-related risk assessment and prevention. Her work aims at build the scientific backround supporting public health decision makers, while maintaining  university teaching activity and PhD thesis supervision as Professor in exercise physiology, human nutrition and public health. She has been graduated from the University of Aix Marseille II in 1995 in Human Movement Science, her research focusing on exercise-induced oxidative stress, nutrition and training adaptive effects until 2006. She has been involved as scientific expert for various French and European institutions, as chair or member of working groups. To date, the guiding principle of her expertise lead and management for physical activity is the need to demonstrate its cross-cutting nature both in area of risk assessment and public health policies.

Title of HEPA 2022 Keynote presentation: Physical activity as a key factor for cross-cutting risk assessment

Description of HEPA 2022 Keynote presentation: Moving little, sleeping badly or eating poorly, ignoring our biological rhythms are all major risks factors for our health. Physical activity has long been mainly regarded as a factor of health improvement, whereas it is the lack of activity which constitutes a hazard for human health. Actually, physical (in)activity-related factors (PAFs) – as both physical inactivity and sedentarity – must be intrinsically analyzed as a health risk. In everyday language, "risk" and "hazard" are often used confusedly when referring to a threat. However, these two words refer to two distinct concepts, and at the earliest stage of assessment, PAFs have to be characterized as a hazard. The usual approach in toxicology leads to set health reference values. In view of these values, the calculation of exposure therefore makes possible to quantify the risk. In addition, because of the way that PAFs interfer with exposure-related physiopathogical response, they have to be taken into account in multifactorial risk-assessments. Should we not consider the individual as a whole, in a close relationship to its environment and move away from silo-based approaches towards an integrated vision of health risk? This assumption calls for due consideration to be given to physical activity in the assessment of human exposure-related to health risks. The talk will aim to demonstrate the need for an integrated and cross-cutting risk assessment based on scientific evidence in which physical (in)activity can now definitely take its place. At last, isn’t it a way to simply, concretely, illustrate the conceptual approach of exposome?