Presenter Profiles

 Professor David Martin

Keynote speaker

Professor David Martin has accumulated 25 years of experience working with Olympic and professional athletes and is widely recognised as an innovator and leader in high performance sport. Professor Martin is also an accomplished applied sport scientist with more than 110 peer-reviewed publications investigating topics such as talent identification, demands of competition, fatigue management, competition analysis, altitude training, and thermoregulation. He often presents his research at international sport science meetings.

Additionally, Professor Martin has worked with world-class coaches across different sports, including cycling, skiing, combat sports and basketball. At the Australian Institute of Sport, he was a senior physiologist, a national sport science coordinator for Cycling, a project leader for Cycling and Skeleton Talent Identification Projects, and a Director of Performance for the AIS Combat Centre, an initiative he spearheaded that was designed to raise international competitiveness in four Australian Olympic combat sports. Over five Summer Olympic Games he oversaw cycling sport science. The cycling teams supported by Professor Martin and his colleagues won eight gold, eight silver and twelve bronze medals. He has also worked with Australian world record holders, world champions and Australia’s only winner of the Tour de France. Professor Martin recently worked in the NBA where he served as the Director for Performance Research and Development for the Philadelphia 76ers. He is currently a Professor in the School of Behavioural and Health Science at ACU and the Chief Scientist for APEIRON, a US start-up company focusing on performance and healthy aging.

Professor Louise Burke

Professor Louise Burke is a sports dietitian with nearly 40 years of experience in the education and counselling of elite athletes. She was Head of Sports Nutrition at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) from 1990 to 2018 and continues at the AIS as Chief of Nutrition Strategy. She was also the dietitian for the Australian Olympic team at the Summer Olympic Games from 1996 to 2012.

Professor Burke’s publications include more than 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters, and the authorship or editorship of several textbooks on sports nutrition. She is an editor of the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. She was a founding member of the Executive of Sports Dietitians Australia and is a Director of the IOC Diploma in Sports Nutrition. She was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2009 for her contribution to sports nutrition. In 2014 she was appointed as Chair in Sports Nutrition for the Mary MacKillop Institute of Health Research at ACU in Melbourne.

Associate Professor Shona Halson

Shona Halson is an associate professor in the School of Behavioural and Health Sciences at ACU. Prior to this she was a senior physiologist at the Australian Institute of Sport for 15 years. She was the head recovery physiologist for the AIS from 2002 to 2018. Shona has a PhD in exercise physiology and has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of sleep, recovery, fatigue, and travel. She is an associate editor of the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. Shona was selected as the Director of the Australian Olympic Committee Recovery Centre for three Olympic Games. She also provides consultancy services to the Australian Open Tennis Tournament and Nike as part of the Nike Performance Council and Nike Scientific Advisory Panel.

Selwyn Griffith

Selwyn Griffith has been an integral part of the Brisbane Lions high performance department for eight years. He has held a number of positions in the medical and strength and conditioning departments. He holds masters degrees in high performance sport from ACU and in osteopathy and has a keen interest in strength and power profiling and programming and return to performance strategies. His current role involves the development and implementation of strength and power programs for the AFL squad and return to performance programs for injured athletes, including strength and power assessments and programming, re-conditioning and training load management.