A highly regarded scientist and tech innovator from The University of Western Australia has won a prestigious international award for her achievements in bridging the gap between biomechanics research and practice in sport.
Professor Jacqueline Alderson, Director of Technology at the UWA Tech & Policy Lab, has been honoured with the Geoffrey Dyson Award, the highest honour of the International Society of Biomechanics in Sport (ISBS), at the society’s 42nd annual conference in Salzburg, Austria.
“I’m honoured to receive such a prestigious award and would like to especially thank my closest mentors, Emeritus Professor Bruce Elliott AM, Professor Joseph Hamill and Daryl Foster OAM, for their unwavering support throughout my career,” Professor Alderson said.
The award recognises her influential international reputation and impact on the field of sports biomechanics over the past three decades.
Professor Alderson has been a pioneer in applied machine learning for health and sport applications and in envisioning blue-sky research and development programs, such as for digital human twins.
In the past four years, she has complemented her leading-edge scientific research with principled advocacy and interdisciplinary projects on meaningful governance of people’s most intimate information.
Professor Alderson built on the UWA Tech & Policy Lab’s projects on sports data governance in professional and high-performance sport in her ceremony keynote, Biomechanics in the age of AI: navigating a discipline at the crossroads.
She discussed identifying considerations of privacy and power that accompany AI adoption and cautioned against a shift away from sports science expertise towards data and AI investments.
“Sports biomechanists must critically assess the potential and risk of AI and data to preserve the foundations of the art and science of biomechanics,” Professor Alderson said.
Professor Alderson called on conference delegates to recognise that biomechanists are developing and publishing biometric techniques that can have grave consequences for rights and freedoms.
Professor Alderson is a Fellow and former executive council member of ISBS and its parent organisation, the International Society of Biomechanics. She recently completed a Fulbright Senior Scholarship at Stanford University, as the inaugural recipient of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia Fulbright Professional Alliance Award.