Scroll down for biographies and photos of the speakers

Lectures
Hans Braun
Asker Jeukendrup
Romain Meeusen
David Nieman
Beate Pfeiffer
Kevin Tipton
Bernd Wolfarth

Workshops
Nick Broad
Asker Jeukendrup
Sam Mettler
Tim Meyer
Trent Stellingwerff
Kevin Tipton
Bernd Wolfarth

Bernd Wolfarth

Dr. med. Bernd Wolfarth is deputy chief and leading senior physician of the Department for Preventive and Rehabilitative Sports medicine at the Technical University Munich. He is specialized in internal medicine and sports medicine. After his medical studies in Freiburg, he continued his medical education as an specialist for internal medicine at the University Hospital in Freiburg. In October 2003 he moved to his current position in Munich. Beside his clinical work he is involved in teaching medical students and sports-science students in Prevention, Rehabilitation and Sports medicine at the TU Munich.  His scientific interest is focusing on genetics, performance and trainability. He was post-doc for one year in Prof. Bouchards lab in Quebec/Canada and had thereafter a couple of visits in the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge/USA. Resulting from this collaboration he published more than 20 international original and review articles in the field of molecular genetics. In applied sports medicine Dr. Wolfarth serves as the head physician of the German ski association and is physician for the German biathlon and cross-country team since several years. For the FIFA world-cup 2006 he was responsible as the organizing head physician at the venue in Munich. At the Olympics 2002, 2006 and 2008 he worked as physician with the German Olympic team. For the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver/Canada 2010 he is the designated head physician for the German Olympic Team.  

Asker Jeukendrup

Asker Jeukendrup is a professor of Exercise Metabolism at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences and Director of the Human Performance Laboratory. Originally from the Netherlands, Asker lived and worked in Austin Texas (University of Texas) for a year and moved to Birmingham in the United Kingdom in 1998.
Asker and his coworkers have performed cutting edge research into the effects of nutrition on exercise performance, recovery and training adaptations. Asker has published extensively (more than 120 papers and book chapters) on the links between nutrition, exercise metabolism and performance. He has also written books on Sport Nutrition and High Performance Cycling, is the Editor of the European Journal of Sport Science and member of the editorial board of several other journals. In 2005 he was awarded a Danone Chair in Nutrition at the Free University Brussels in Belgium.
Asker’s main goal is to perform research at the cutting edge but also to apply this research and translate scientific findings into something that is useful to athletes and in fact every individual who wants to be physically active. Ultimately the research is aimed at helping people to achieve their potential; whether this is being more physically active or winning medals at Olympic Games. He has worked with many top athletes including track and field athletes of UK Athletics, Chelsea Football Club, Olympic swimmers and Tour de France cyclists.  Asker was one of the members of a group brought together by the IOC to formulate a consensus statement on sports nutrition.
Asker is also an Ironman triathlete himself and tries to apply the research findings in his own races. He was GB age group duathlon champion in 2004, won a marathon (San Francisco Golden Gate Headlands) in 2006 and competed at the European and World Championships duathlon, Ironman and Ironman 70.3. He completed 16 Ironman races including 3 times Ironman Hawaii. His main goal is to qualify again for the World Championship Ironman in Kona Hawaii.

David Nieman

David Nieman is a professor of health and exercise science, and director of the Human Performance Labs at Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, and the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, NC.  Dr. Nieman is a pioneer in the research area of exercise immunology and helped establish that regular moderate exercise lowers upper respiratory tract infection rates while improving immunosurveillance, and that heavy exertion increases infection rates while causing immune dysfunction.  His current research is focused on nutritional countermeasures to exercise-induced immune dysfunction including unique plant molecules such as quercetin, isoquercetin, epigallocatechin 3-gallate, and beta-glucan.  Dr. Nieman has received $4.1 million in research grants and published more than 230 peer-reviewed publications in journals and books, and sits on nine journal editorial boards including the Journal of Applied Physiology and Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.  He is the author of nine books on health, exercise physiology, and nutrition, including Exercise Testing and Prescription: A Health-Related Approach (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010, now in its 7th edition).  Dr. Nieman has served two terms as president of the International Society of Exercise and Immunology, and is currently running for Vice-President of the American College of Sports Medicine.  He has run 58 marathons and ultramarathons, and was an acrobatic gymnast and coach for 10 years.  His marathon PR is 2:37, and he has run the Pikes Peak Marathon twice, with a 16th place finish.

Romain Meeusen

Prof Dr Romain Meeusen, PhD is head of the department of Human Physiology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research interest is focussed on “Exercise and the Brain” exploring the influence of neurotransmitters on human performance and training.  Recent work is focussing on thermoregulation, Overtraining Syndrome, neurogenesis. He teaches on exercise physiology, training & coaching and sports physiotherapy.  Romain published over 200 articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals, 18 books on sport physiotherapy, and gave lectures at more than 250 national and international conferences. He is President of the Belgian Society for Sports Medicine and Sports Science and President Belgian Federation of Sports Physiotherapy.  He is board member (treasurer) of the European College of Sport Science. In 2009 he received the Belgian  ‘Francqui Chair’ at the Université Libre de Bruxelles on ‘Exercise and the Brain’. He is director of the Human Performance lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he works with several top athletes, and is scientific advisor of the ‘Lotto Cycling Institute’ (Silence-Lotto professional cycling team).

Sam Mettler

Dr. Samuel Mettler studied sport science and human nutrition in Zurich, before he started his PhD in sports nutrition at the ETH Zurich. A part of his PhD was in collaboration with Kevin Tipton of the University of Birmingham. Therefore, he lived and worked in Birmingham in 2007 for a research project about the influence of protein on body composition during weight loss. Since his graduation last year he is working as nutrition scientist at the ETH Zurich.
Sam has been a competitive track athlete for more then ten years. However, his engagement has changed from competitive to rather recreational over the last two years. As an athlete he was always in close contact with elite athletes and applied sports nutrition. In Switzerland he is actively engaged in different roles in the communication of applied sports nutrition to sports dieticians, coaches and athletes.

Tim Meyer

Prof Dr med. Tim Meyer studied medicine and sport science at the universities of Hanover and Göttingen, Germany. Besides his German exams in both subjects he passed the American medical exam. Meyer started his medical work at the Institute of Sports and Preventive Medicine in 1996, wrote his doctoral thesis in Göttingen about endurance training with panic patients. His habilitation thesis at the University of Saarland was about applications of gas exchange measurements. In 2007 he followed a call of the university Paderborn as head of the Institute of Sports Medicine. In October 2008 he was called as head of the Institute of Sports and Preventive Medicine of the University of Saarland. Meyer´s focus of research is exercise physiology and training prescription. Under his supervision, several training studies were conducted in elite and health-oriented athletes among them many soccer players. Besides his university work, Meyer works as team physician for the German soccer association (DFB), since 2001 as part of the national squad´s medical service team.

Beate Pfeiffer

Beate Pfeiffer gained her degree (“Diplom”) in nutrition at Hohenheim University (Germany), which provided her with a broad background in physiology and human nutrition. Due to her strong personal interest in sports nutrition she took on a job within the marketing department of one of the world leading sports nutrition brands. As a specialist for sports nutrition she gave advice to the product development and got an insight in the process of developing foods. She gained practical experience while working with top level athletes as well as with recreationally active people.
Her interest in research and science and the desire to learn more about the underlying mechanisms of exercise metabolism led her to the decision to move to Birmingham where she is working towards a PhD in Sports Nutrition at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, University Birmingham. Her research is focusing on carbohydrate metabolism and gastrointestinal problems during exercise. The main goal of her work is to bring research from the laboratory into practical solutions for athletes in the field.

In her comparatively short scientific career she was a speaker at national and international conferences already, she won the 2008 ACSM Nutrition Interest Group Student Research Award and she is assigned as a reviewer for the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism (IJSNEM).
Besides her research she is working as a nutritional adviser for various athletes such as professional cyclists (Team Columbia) as well as triathletes and runners of different levels.

Hans Braun

Hans Braun studied Sport Science at the German Sport University Cologne and Nutrition Science at the University Bonn.

Since 1999 he is responsible for nutritional advice to the Olympic Training Centre Rhineland. The centre supports about 600 elite athletes from junior to Olympic level, of which 68 were able to qualify for the Olympic Games in Beijing.
An important aspect of his work with athletes is to translate scientific developments and findings from the field of sports nutrition into daily training routines. As part of this transfer, it is necessary to know the requirements of each sport (e.g. gymnastics, marathon, hockey, judo) but also take account of individual circumstances.

In 2006 Hans joined the German Sport University and the German Research Centre of Elite Sport to establish a sports nutrition department. A main part of his work is to evaluate nutritional status and dietary supplement use of young athletes. Future work will focus on additive biomarkers to assess nutritional situation.

In addition, Hans gives lectures in sports nutrition for the German Olympic Sport Association and the German Football Association within the coaches’ license program. He is also Football Coach with a UEFA A License.

Hans enjoyed athletics and football on amateur level. Currently he only engages in recreational sport, but surprisingly managed to become Team Champion of the 2008 Birmingham Sports Nutrition Conference Outdoor Competition ;-)

Nick Broad

Nick Broad is the sports scientist/nutritionist of Chelsea Football Club

Trent Stellingwerff

Dr Trent Stellingwerff takes a research and academic-based background, coupled with practical coaching and individual competitive experiences, to form the cornerstones of his personalized approach to the area of exercise physiology and nutritional recommendations for athletes.  Trent started this development while studying human nutrition and exercise physiology and earning an Honors BSc while also being a varsity middle-distance athlete and team captain at Cornell University, Ithaca NY.  He then graduated from the University of Guelph in Canada and holds a PhD Degree in the area of Exercise and Skeletal Muscle Physiology.
After a post-doctorate research fellowship at Maastricht University, Netherlands, focusing on human muscle recovery with nutritional interventions, Trent took a job as the senior leading scientist in Performance Nutrition at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne Switzerland, where he and his wife currently reside. Trent has a great record of scientific publications in major scientific and medical journals.  In 2007, Trent was the lead author and presenter of 'Nutrition for middle-distance athletes' for the 3-day IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) Nutrition Consensus Congress in Monaco.  He is also an active Track and Field / Cross-Country runner with an impressive athletic performance history and continues to compete in ECO-Challenges and road-races.  He is also a Level III International Certified Coach (NCCP) and currently assists in coaching his wife Hilary who is ranked top-30 in the world in women's 1500m, as well as coaches and consults several other Olympics level
athletes from around the world. 

Kevin Tipton

Dr Kevin Tipton received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Zoology from the Univ. of Kentucky and the Univ of South Florida, respectively. He began his doctoral studies at the Florida State Univ. and transferred to Auburn Univ where he earned a PhD in Nutrition. He did his postdoctoral studies on the interaction of nutrition and exercise on muscle protein metabolism under the direction of Dr. Robert Wolfe at the Univ. of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.  Subsequently, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor, Dept of Surgery, University of Texas Medical Branch and on the Scientific Staff of the Metabolism Unit, Shriners Hospital for Children – Galveston. He continued his research on muscle protein metabolism, exercise and nutrition and served as the Director of the Exercise Metabolism Laboratory at the Shriner’s Hospital. In spring 2005, Kevin began as Senior Lecturer in Exercise Metabolism in the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, University of Birmingham.
Kevin’s research has been focused on exercise, nutrition and muscle metabolism in humans. The general goal of the research has been toexamine means of increasing muscle anabolism in athletes and exercising individuals as well as those populations that suffer from muscle loss. The studies primarily utilize stable isotopic tracer methods to measure muscle protein synthesis, breakdown and net muscle protein balance in response to exercise and nutritional interventions, as well as the molecular mechanisms of the metabolic responses. He has published over 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters and has been invited to speak at numerous international and national conferences.
He is an Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology and on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism.
His interest in exercise science extends to the application of the science to athletic populations. He was the Sports Nutrition adviser for the Athletic Department at Auburn University and recently served as a Visiting Scientist at the Australian Institute of Sport in the Department of Sports Nutrition and for the International Olympic Committee on the IOC Sports Nutrition Consensus Conference committee. He also has coached and served as fitness and nutrition advisor for amateur soccer and rugby clubs. Whenever uninjured, he still trains for and plays soccer and rugby and runs road races and, with luck, triathlons.