Movement & Sport

Alien van der Sluis
My dream is for every child to grow up in a healthy and stimulating environment. I am contributing as a boundary researcher, bringing together scientific, professional and experiential knowledge. I am experienced in design-based research approaches and have co-developed several interventions on stimulating active healthy lifestyle and self-regulation of children and adolescents from within the school context. Currently, my work consists of developing and evaluating Tijd voor Toekomst (Time for Future), a program for enriched schooldays for children in the province of Groningen with the ambition to create equal chances for growing up healthy and with a promising future. I have a PhD in Human Movement Sciences and work as a senior researcher for the Institute for Sport Sciences at the Hanzehogeschool.

Remo Mombarg
dr. Remo Mombarg is a Lector Physical Education (PE) and youth sports at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences. The main goal of this lectorship is to develop knowledge about effective interventions that make children sport, in a pleasant, healthy, and sustainable way. How do we prepare children for a life in sports? Remo has extensive experiences in sportdevelopment for children in vocational education. Recently a project called “selfregulation in sport and health” was funded by the NRO (Dutch council for research). In this project students, researchers, and PE-teachers perform this research, in so called ‘knowledge-working-places’. For children with motor coordination difficulties, such as children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), we focus on a strong learning environment, that stimulates children to trust their bodies and to enjoy to be physically active. This interaction between students, teachers/researchers, PE-teachers, and children, is highly fruitful for all parties. Children receive extra attention from up-to-date students – who learn to work with less capable children, teachers/researchers can perform their research on-the-job, and PE-teachers see their children grow. This cooperation resulted in many products such as curricula,¹ a book chapter,² television parts,³ and several articles, e.g. on Serious Gaming^4,5. Further, one of our colleagues wrote her PhD-thesis on DCD⁶ and supervises graduate students in their research on, for example, the effects of implicit and explicit learning strategies in children with motor coordination difficulties.

The collaboration between students, teachers/researchers, PE-teachers, and children pays special attention to children with motor coordination difficulties, to help them find a way into sports and to receive compliments, because all children deserve to joyfully participate in sports.

Extra keyword: Physical Education

Hans Hobbelen
Hans Hobbelen (PhD, PT) started his career as a physiotherapist in a nursing home in the city of Eindhoven the Netherlands and stayed at this job for 22 years. In 2001, he received his master degree in human movement sciences. He received his PhD in 2010 on the topic of paratonia, a distinctive form of hypertonia in dementia. This made him a leading scientist in the field of paratonia and movement disorders in dementia. He is since 2012 professor (Lector) in Ageing and Allied Health Care at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, The Netherlands. Besides movement disorders in dementia his main field of interest is frailty, in specific the multi-dimensionality of Frailty. Hans is pioneer of FAITH Research (funded by SIA-SPRONG). FAITH is the abbreviation of Frailty by Assessment, Intervention and Technology towards Health and entails the development of an infrastructure of research on frail and vulnerable populations. The FAITH consortium is a consortium of the professorships of the northern Universities of Applied Sciences (Hanzehogeschool and NHL-Stenden) with expertise on frail elderly and 25 partners ranging from care organisations, SMEs and health insurers.

Furthermore Hans is member of the scientific board of the Dutch physiotherapy association (WCF, KNGF), member of the Clinical Consortium on Healthy Ageing of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and since may 2019 President of The International association of Physiotherapists working with Older People (IPTOP, official subgroup of WCPT)

Aly Waninge
My name is Aly Waninge (PhD, PT). The overarching goal of my research is to gain scientific knowledge to optimize support for people with intellectual and visual disabilities to improve their participation, lifestyle and health. In line with my professional background as a physiotherapist, I am supervising research projects focusing on the development of interventions, screening and measurement instruments regarding exercise, lifestyle, health, and participation.
I am Professor Participation and health of persons with intellectual and visual disabilities within the Research Group Healthy Ageing, Allied Health Care and Nursing at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen. Also, I am co-program leader within Health Psychology Research at the University Medical Center Groningen. In addition, I am member of the management team of the Academic Collaborative Center related to people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities. Our research has a major impact on supporting this vulnerable group in practice, due to the strong knowledge infrastructure that has been set up within this center. An important topic of my research, healthy lifestyle, is addressed within the Innovation Lab Active Ageing of people with intellectual disability , where research and knowledge transfer are performed. This collaboration between health care organizations that support people with intellectual disabilities in Groningen, Drenthe and Friesland and our research group, is part of FAITH research .

Marianne Nieuwenhuis
Dr. Marianne Nieuwenhuis studied Human Movement Sciences at the University of Groningen and did her PhD at the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital in Utrecht. Since the realisation of the Association of Dutch Burn centres in 2003, she is head of its Clinical Research Program and research coordinator at the Burn Centre of the Martini Hospital. In 2020 she also became professor (lector) in Recovery of functioning and quality of life after burns, at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, The Netherlands. Her research focusses on physical fitness and activity, to help meet the challenge of burn care of how best to enable people who have sustained a burn injury to return to their pre-injury status of functioning, or as close to it as possible. Her professional interests are in the areas of burns, (physical) functioning, rehabilitation, biomechanics and clinical research. Besides research, she enjoys training students (bachelor, master, PhD) and working together with health care professionals and researchers from a variety of disciplines and experience experts, as well as teaching.

Hans Drenth
Hans Drenth (PhD, PT) is professor (lector) of “Short-term care and interprofessional collaboration in frail older people” in the research group “Healthy ageing, Allied Health Care and Nursing” at Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen. His research focuses on effective strategies for short-term admission, such as geriatric rehabilitation care, geriatric-psychiatry and/or specialized care from the nursing home for older people living at home. The aim of this is to allow (pre) frail older people to continue living at home longer and, above all, better while retaining functional capacity and autonomy. Measures in the field of exercise, nutrition and in the psychosocial domain are important strategies to influence the process of frailty. A broad, integrated approach, possibly supported by relevant technology and interprofessional collaboration is essential.

Hans is specialized in motor function of frail older people and people with dementia and obtained a double doctorate at the RU Groningen and the VU Brussels with the thesis “Motor function, paratonia and glycation cross-linked in older people”. From this PhD project the international joint research group (IJRG) Movement-Related impairment in Ageing, in short ‘Move in Age’ was emerged. This IJRG research aims to unravel the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms, their consequences in functional decline and the development of preventive and therapeutic strategies to counteract paratonia, a distinctive form of hypertonia in dementia.

In addition, Hans works as a geriatric physiotherapist at ZuidOostZorg, Care and Knowledge Center for elderly care in Friesland, the Netherlands.