Sports
Dr Jennifer Cumming is a Reader in Sport and Exercise Psychology from the University of Birmingham (UK) and is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) after completing a Post Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education in 2010 was awarded the 2012 Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Birmingham. Prior to this, she was received her PhD in Kinesiology from the University of Western Ontario in 2001 and her MA from the University of Ottawa in 1999. Dr Cumming’s current research focuses on community-based approaches to developing practical and culturally-tailored interventions for athletes and, more recently, individuals who are traditionally considered ‘harder to reach’. She is interested in how individuals learn to effectively regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours with mental skills training, and determine the impact of self-regulation (or dysregulation) on performance, health, and well-being. Whereas sport psychology customarily focuses on mental skills as a regulatory capacity that athletes use in competitive and non-competitive situations, she more broadly uses this knowledge to support health-related quality of life in communities that are more challenging to engage, such as homeless adolescents. Dr Cumming is the Primary Investigator of large funded study (2014-2020) to co-develop, co-implement, and co-evaluate the Mental Skills Training for Life™ programme as part of community-based participatory action research with a large supported housing service. She was nominated for the University of Birmingham’s Founders’ Award for Excellence in Policy Advancement in 2015 and Enterprising Birmingham’s Most Innovative Collaboration award in 2017. Her work has also been recognised as good practice by Public Health England and is being used to inform interventions for preventing and reducing homelessness in the UK. She has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and is the current co-editor of Imagination, Cognition and Personality.