ACU High Performance Sport experts

Professor Gert-Jan Pepping 

Gert-Jan Pepping joined ACU in 2014 and is a Professor of Human Movement Sciences in the School of Behavioural and Health Sciences at the Brisbane Campus.

Gert-Jan is a leading expert in the ecological approach to perception and action, with a focus on decision-making, perceptual-motor control, and situation awareness in high performance sport. His research investigates how athletes perceive, explore, and act in dynamic environments, and how training can be designed to enhance skilled performance through representative practice.

With over 25 years of international experience, Professor Pepping works across elite sport, defence, and human performance domains. He is particularly interested in how affordance perception underpins expertise, and how insights from ecological psychology can inform athlete development and coaching practices.

His current work focuses on the development of applied tools and methods to better understand athlete-environment interactions in the field, supporting practitioners in designing learning environments that reflect the demands of performance.