IPEN Research
Teams
Denmark
IPEN Adult and Adolescent Research Team
IPEN Adult Primary Investigator
Prof. Jens Troelsen
Orcid ID: 0000-0001-8105-0349
Jens Troelsen has served as head of the Active Living research unit, University of Southern Denmark (SDU) for > 8yrs. From 2021 he served as head of the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, SDU, with 180 employees and more than 1.200 students.
He has authored articles, books, and reports on the significance of housing, land use and infrastructure for physical activity behaviours. In recent years, focus has been on intervention research. Specifically, studying the effect of interventions targeted at different subgroups combined with detailed process analysis. Large studies have centered on children and adolescent conditions required to integrate physical activity into everyday life with the objective of obtaining evidence-based knowledge about how the built environment combined with individual and organizational initiatives can promote physical activity.
He serves as a peer reviewer for national and international journals. Troelsen is very committed to ensuring that his work impacts public health. To this end, close collaborations have been established with foundations, organizations, municipalities, the National Board of Health, and several international partners. Jens joined IPEN in 2006.
IPEN Adolescent Primary Investigator
Jasper Schipperijn
Orcid ID: 0000-0002-6558-7610
Jasper Schipperijn is a Professor in Active Living Environments at the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark. Since early 2022, he is heading the World Playground Research Institute (www.playgroundresearch.org). He has an MSc degree in Forest and Nature Management from Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and a PhD degree in Greenspace Management from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
His research interests revolve around three main topics 1) playgrounds, 2) conducting multi-disciplinary intervention studies to create active living environments and 3) developing tools and methods that make it possible to measure active living and the environment it takes place in. Jasper has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles and numerous reports and popular publications.
Jasper joined the IPEN in 2010. Initially, his primary role in IPEN was creating GIS measures for the Danish IPEN Adult study. For the IPEN adolescent study, Jasper was a co-investigator. He was heavily involved in the adding GPS devices to data collection in many IPEN adolescent countries. Since data-collection, Jasper has acted as the IPEN lead for processing combined accelerometer and GPS data. A complicated task due to involving large amounts of sensitive data that can’t be shared in unprocessed and aggregated form.
This type of work, providing guidance and support for PhD students from research groups around the world working with GPS-based measures of activity behaviour is an important part of his job. The past years he has hosted 16 foreign PhD students working with combined accelerometer and GPS data. Moving forward, his method development work will continue as part of the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie ’Learning Network for Advanced Behavioural Data Analysis (LABDA). https://labda-project.eu/.
Research Team
Associate Prof. Lars Breum Christiansen
Orcid ID: 0000-0002-5142-3623
Lars Breum Christiansen is Associate Professor in the Active Living Research Unit at Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics at University of Southern Denmark. He leads the Research and Implementation Centre for Human Movement and Learning. This focuses on research in relation to physical activity for children and youth in a variety of contexts together with local, national, and international partners.
He earned his PhD investigating the impact of a multicomponent intervention on adolescent physical activity and health. From 2015 to 2019 he was PI of the intervention project: Move for Well-being in Schools. Lars joined the IPEN in 2009. He was responsible for the data collection of the Danish arm of the IPEN Adult study. He has been focusing primarily on active transport and is the main author on a national IPEN Adult paper investigating the differences in neighbourhood walkability and residential self-selection across life stages in relation to active transport behaviour. Lars also led the international paper investigating objectively measured built environment variables with transport-related walking and cycling.
Dr. Tanja Schmidt (Adolescent only team)
Orcid ID: 0000-0003-2476-8711
Tanja Schmidt is a post-doctoral researcher at the Active Living Research Unit at the Department of Sports Sciences and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark. Tanja is a health researcher studying built environmental and psychosocial determinants of health and health-related behaviours. She has a specific focus on physical activity in children and older adults. Tanja joined the IPEN in 2014, to be part of the IPEN Adolescent study. Specifically, she is a co-investigator of the Danish arms, and was responsible for the data collection.
Project
Movability Study in Danish Cities
The moveability study is an observational epidemiologic study. It design allows comparisons between neighborhoods stratified based on their “movability” characteristics from Geographic Information System (GIS) and socio-economic status. The primary aim of the movability study is to evaluate the relationships between objectively-defined high-walkable (n=8) and low-walkable (n=8) neighborhoods in the two Danish cities, Roskilde and Kolding, and physical activity levels in 500 randomly selected adults (18 – 65 years).
Denmark Photo Codebook