Charlotte Edwardson
Professor in Sedentary Behaviour and Health (Interventions and Measurement)
Biography
Professor Charlotte Edwardson completed a BSc in Applied Sports Science (2004), MSc (2005) and PhD (part-time, 2010) in Physical Activity and Health, from Loughborough University. Alongside her PhD, she worked as a Research Associate (2005-2010) for the Institute of Youth Sport, Loughborough University where she specialised in the evaluation of physical activity initiatives in young people. Following this she moved into the area of diabetes prevention and worked as a Research Associate at the Leicester Diabetes Centre (2010-2013), on several randomised controlled trials which focused on increasing physical activity and reducing sedentary behaviour in people with a high risk of type 2 diabetes.
In 2013, Professor Edwardson was appointed Lecturer in the Diabetes Research Centre, University of Leicester, then Associate Professor in 2016 and subsequently Professor in 2023. Over the last decade, Charlotte has worked with Professor Yates to establish the Leicester Lifestyle and Health Research Group (LLHRG), which aims to understand how movement behaviours can prevent and manage long-term health conditions e.g. type 2 diabetes. The LLHRG (of which Charlotte is Deputy Director) were recently awarded £14 million as part of Research England’s Expanding Excellence scheme. Charlotte was the co-lead of the UoA24 Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 submission, which was the first submission by the University of Leicester to UoA24 and which ranked 2nd overall out of 61 higher educational institutes submitted.
Charlotte has been pivotal in creating the infrastructure to embed accelerometer assessments across studies within the Leicester Diabetes Centre and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Leicester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), enabling accelerometer assessments in >13,000 participants over the past decade. She has published >170 peer-reviewed articles and has been awarded ~£28 million from prestigious funding bodies such as NIHR, MRC, UKRI, and the European Commission. Charlotte is also currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal for the Measurement of Physical Behaviour and is part of the UK Biobank’s working group on wearables.
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Professor Edwardson’s current research encompasses developing and evaluating interventions to reduce sitting time and increase physical activity in a range of populations and contexts, establishing valid and reliable assessment of physical behaviours and developing robust methods for cleaning and processing accelerometer data. She has developed software to bulk process, visualise and summarise activPAL data and has made this freely available for the research community (Processing PAL) through github.
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Professor Edwardson co-leads the Prevention, Obesity and Diabetes module on the Diabetes MSc, PGDip, PGCert, by distance learning.
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Professor Edwardson’s research has received national and international media attention including a feature on the front page of The Times, in The Telegraph, the Guardian, and on local, national, and international news channels and radio stations e.g. ITV news and Sky radio. Charlotte has also been featured on Channel 5’s The Gadget Show and BBC Radio 2’s Inside Health programme.
Articles
