Nathalie Kirby comes from Windsor, Ontario, where she completed a Bachelors in Human Kinetics with Honours at the University of Windsor. She completed an MSc by Research at the University of Birmingham, which has subsequently been transferred towards a PhD in Exercise and Sport Science.
Nathalie’s research is addressing the significant gender disparity and underrepresentation of female cohorts in the sport and exercise medicine literature. Female athletes competing in hot environments currently rely on heat acclimation recommendations and scientific evidence gathered almost entirely from male cohorts. In her thesis on ‘exercise performance responses to passive and active heat acclimation in female and male athletes’, Nathalie is examining heat acclimation protocols and exercise performance outcomes in high-level athletes with a focus on females. She aims to better understand sex differences in adaptation to heat stress, which must be considered when female athletes are preparing for competition in hot, stressful environments, such as the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
One of her studies involved recruiting over 50 well-trained male and female athletes to undertake a two-month training intervention to determine if sauna bathing after exercise improves temperate exercise performance and tolerance to exercise heat stress. The findings have been presented at the International Conference on Environmental Ergonomics, the Congress of the European College of Sport Science, and The Physiological Society’s conference, Extreme Environmental Physiology – Life at the Limits. She also published a paper in a Frontiers in Physiology special issue titled, ‘Towards Tokyo 2020: What Will Contribute to Optimal Olympic Athlete Performance?’. Alongside her thesis, Nathalie was a lead researcher commissioned by Public Health England to create the first physical activity guidelines to have considered disabled adults from all major impairment groups. These findings have now been incorporated into the 2019 UK Chief Medical Officers’ Physical Activity Guidelines, and the associated infographic has been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (also available on the GOV.UK website).
Nathalie has always been passionate about gender in sport, having been a competitive athlete (two-time Canadian Interuniversity Sport Academic All-Canadian award winner) and an active member of Leadership Advancement for Women in Sport in Canada, an organization committed to dismantling barriers to gender equality in sport. Based on her research and experience, she aspires to achieve a global impact by considering the challenges that female athletes face around the world.
