Insights from an Embedded PhD: #2 - Sian Allen
Who are you ?
My name is Sian Allen and I’m currently working as a Research Manager in the R&D team at lululemon athletica, a sports apparel and human well-being company based in Vancouver, Canada. Before moving to Canada, I was based in New Zealand, where I completed my PhD at the Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand (SPRINZ) at AUT University in Auckland while also working for High Performance Sport New Zealand providing performance science and data analysis support to New Zealand’s Olympic swimming programme. Prior to my PhD, I completed my Master’s degree in Exercise Physiology at Loughborough University in the UK, and spent a couple of years working as a Performance Scientist with the British Swimming Programme at the Intensive Training Centre in Stirling.
PhD expectations
During the 2 years I spent working as a Performance Scientist in an elite sport environment after finishing my Master’s I realized that I was now in a position to be able to gather different types and amounts of data from elite athletes, but I didn’t yet have the requisite data analytics and statistical modelling skills to be able to analyse them effectively and extract the meaningful insights that I wanted to be able to for coaches and other key stakeholders. My primary expectation in undertaking my PhD therefore, was to build these data analytics and modelling skills and to learn how to apply them in a real-world environment, in order to create practical tools and insights that have a meaningful impact on key performance decisions.
Phd topic
The capacity to objectively track, predict, and evaluate changes in competitive performance is a critical component of effective athlete development programmes, athlete and sport funding and resource decisions, and strategic performance and training decisions. Although large amounts of repeated-measures competition performance data were readily accessible online within the sport of swimming, little previous research had attempted to fully utilize these to develop practical solutions to objectively track and evaluate athlete age-related performance progression.
The aim of my PhD therefore, was to take a data-informed approach to generate practical tools that could be used by coaches, athletes, scientists and administrators for tracking athlete performance. These solutions were of interest to my industry PhD partner, High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ) to support with a rationale for evidence-based investment decisions, an improved understanding of athlete development pathways, and a means for quantifying the impact of interventions and factors affecting sports performance. Given the nation’s small population and finite supply of finances for elite sports, solutions that improve the effectiveness of available funding and of talent identification strategies were deemed critical for New Zealand’s sporting success
Phd context
My PhD was conducted as a jointly-funded partnership between SPRINZ and HPSNZ, based at the Millennium Institute of Sport and Health facility in Auckland. This multi-purpose facility housed a 50m pool, the headquarters of Swimming New Zealand, a gym and sports medicine facilities on the ground floor, the University offices on the second floor, and the High Performance Sport offices on the third floor, meaning that all of the key stakeholders involved with my PhD operated within the same building. This presented a unique opportunity to understand many of the key questions informing performance and training decisions from coaches, athletes, sport science practitioners and administrators that my PhD would ultimately help inform.
My PhD supervisors were Prof. Will Hopkins who worked at AUT University, and Dr Tom Vandenbogaerde, who worked for HPSNZ as the lead Sport Scientist with Swimming New Zealand, and previously completed his PhD with AUT University.
Positive and negative aspects of an Embedded PhD
One of the big reasons I moved from the UK to New Zealand for this PhD opportunity was because while I really wanted to continue my learning and academic development by studying further, I always knew I only wanted to do it if I could continue to work in an elite sport environment as well and try to have real-world impact by applying the skills I was learning. In the UK at the time (2011), embedded PhD opportunities within professional teams or elite sporting organizations were extremely rare, and so mine seemed like a unique opportunity.
I was extremely fortunate that the embedded model was quite well established in New Zealand, with SPRINZ and HPSNZ having collaborated on several other joint PhDs previously so many of the issues associated with these programmes had either been ironed out already or had easy-to-figure-out solutions. There was a strong cohort of international students based at SPRINZ and a fantastic group of staff, who made it easy for me to fit in and make sure I had everything I needed from the academic side of things. With everything being based in the same building, I could often split my days between the SPRINZ office and the HPSNZ office, or if I had questions in the middle of the day, I could run up or downstairs and often find someone who could help me. The athletes and coaches I was working with were also in the same building, so it was very easy to feel connected to them, to drop into training sessions to provide sport science support and learn from the applied practitioners working with the team, and to draw on their knowledge and experience to help support my PhD work.
On the negative side, being so close to each of these stakeholders meant that I often got drawn into extra conversations and extra requests for work sometimes unrelated to my PhD. Balancing my time to be able to provide the support to coaches and athletes that they often needed quickly, while trying to work on my PhD was often tricky. I was lucky to have my applied supervisor, Tom, who really helped me balance my time and manage expectations with the sport, but ultimately, I ended up having to extend my PhD timeline by 3 months at my expense, as I had sometimes over-committed to applied work that delayed my PhD work.
Early in my PhD I also had plans for a number of experimental and intervention studies with the elite swimming squad. However, there were clear challenges in several areas, including personnel changes within the coaching staff, being able to get the full buy-in and commitment of athletes and coaches to a research plan that was well defined enough to meet academic standards, and the reticence of the University Ethics committee to easily approve applied performance-focused projects. Owing to all these factors, I ended up pivoting the focus of my PhD primarily towards performance data that could be publicly and easily accessed online, which removed many of the barriers I initially faced. This ended up giving me time to develop new skills, such as coding, which have been hugely beneficial throughout my PhD and in my career since.
Key success factors
There are a few I would highlight based on my specific experience
Create Universal Value – As an embedded PhD you will likely have many more stakeholders with varied needs than either in a purely academic PhD, or in an applied role. At the outset of your PhD, it’s key to understand the expectations of each of these stakeholders in terms of the value or impact you can provide for them in your position. As some simple examples, academic staff are often interested in publications and conference presentations to boost the profile of the University, whereas coaches more commonly require performance support at training and competitions. Being able to keep both sides happy is likely to be beneficial from the perspective of leaving doors open to an academic or applied career after your PhD is over.
Expectation Management – Once expectations are clearly established, you then have to ensure that they are realistic when balanced against one another and lay out some clear commitments for each stakeholder up front so that they can try to plan appropriately. For example, I will provide support at 2 training sessions per week and provide a weekly monitoring report to the coaches. Ultimately, what I found was that you finishing your PhD and doing it to a high quality is no-one else’s responsibility or priority but your own, and if you aren’t able to manage your time effectively to prioritize this work then there’s a strong risk it won’t happen! I observed a few of my fellow embedded PhD students struggle with this also, to the point where some of them never ended up finishing at all!
Mindset – Working in applied sport in any capacity is often a fast-moving, volatile and changing environment in which you have to be prepared for plans to change often. Having a mindset that acknowledges and accepts this and focuses on being agile, flexible and adaptable will serve you well. Doing a PhD in any environment is also a massive undertaking, so combining both of these is undoubtedly hard, and expecting things to go wrong, but being prepared to cope with that rather than panic or complain about it will also be a big advantage. I would also encourage embedded PhD’s to try to think of ways where they can effectively ‘act once, learn twice’ – the more you can do that serves multiple stakeholders or outcomes at the same time, the more you can scale your value and manage your time well. Equally, if there are any decisions that make it easier for you in this process (e.g., collecting ‘free data’ available online, instead of putting expectations on athletes and coaches), don’t be afraid to take them, even if it changes some of your original aims or intentions.
Key traps to avoid
Choose your supervisors wisely: For me, my supervisory team were the perfect balance of representing academic and applied interests, while maintaining a strong rigor research. Having academic supervisors who have an incomplete understanding of the applied sport environment will undoubtedly make it harder for you to have a successful experience. Additionally, I would avoid becoming fixated on the specifics of the ‘what’ in terms of the questions you’re interested in at the beginning, because these will definitely change! If you find the right ‘who’ in terms of your supervisors, this is far more important for a positive and successful learning experience than the specific ‘what’, in my experience.
Avoid shiny objects: Being invited to travel with a team to provide performance support at an overseas competition can be really exciting and invaluable experience! However, it’s easy for so many opportunities in applied sport to be shiny objects that are very hard to say no to, because they’re often fun, exciting, and amazing opportunities for impact and to build your future skills and portfolio. Figuring out what to say yes, and when is so important for protecting your time to help you complete your PhD on time and to a high standard. If you do that well, trust that the exciting opportunities and shiny objects will still be there and that you are setting yourself up to be able to take advantage of more of them, after you’ve submitted the thesis!
Next steps for you?
Currently I am working as a Research Manager in the R&D team at lululemon athletica in Canada. In this role I get to use many of the skills I developed within my PhD, such as coding, research design, and assessment of the real-world effects of interventions. I have been enjoying the challenge of extrapolating these skills beyond supporting elite athletes to developing products, services and experiences that can help a broader population improve their performance, health and well-being. I still love sport and try and maintain my connections to the elite sport world through data analysis and data science consultancy with different teams and sports, and recently leading an online course on how to become an applied performance analyst for developing sport science practitioners.
List of publications during the course of the PhD:
Allen, S. V., Vandenbogaerde, T. J., & Hopkins, W. G. (2014). Career performance trajectories of Olympic swimmers: Benchmarks for talent development. European journal of sport science, 14(7), 643-651.
Allen, S. V., Vandenbogaerde, T. J., Pyne, D. B., & Hopkins, W. G. (2015). Predicting a nation’s Olympic-qualifying swimmers. International journal of sports physiology and performance, 10(4), 431-435.
Allen, S. V., Vandenbogaerde, T. J., & Hopkins, W. G. (2015). The performance effect of centralizing a nation’s elite swim program. International journal of sports physiology and performance, 10(2), 198-203.
Allen, S. V., & Hopkins, W. G. (2015). Age of peak competitive performance of elite athletes: a systematic review. Sports Medicine, 45(10), 1431-1441.
Lipińska, P., Allen, S. V., & Hopkins, W. G. (2016). Modeling parameters that characterize pacing of elite female 800-m freestyle swimmers. European Journal of Sport Science, 16(3), 287-292.
Lipinska, P., Allen, S. V., & Hopkins, W. G. (2016). Relationships between pacing parameters and performance of elite male 1500-m swimmers. International journal of sports physiology and performance, 11(2), 159-163.
Where to contact you?
Email: sianallen@lululemon.com
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sian-Allen
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrSianAllen
If you liked this blog post - or at least learnt something - and would like to collaborate, please drop me an email using the contact form. I’m trying to collect as many interviews as I can!
