Professor Rob Copeland is Director of Sheffield Hallam's Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, and a Chartered Sport and Exercise Psychologist with the Health Care Professions Council and British Psychological Society.  Rob was the Director for ten years until 2022, of the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine in Sheffield, a London 2012 Olympic Games legacy programme that aims to improve the health and wellbeing of the nation through sport, exercise and physical activity. Rob is a Professor of physical activity and health.

Prof. Robert Copeland is a Chartered Sport and Exercise Psychologist (BPS, HCPC) and Professor of physical activity and health at Sheffield Hallam University. Rob is Director of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) at Sheffield Hallam University, a world-leading research centre dedicated to improving the health and wellbeing of the population through innovations that help people move. Following a £14m investment from the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care, the AWRC provides world class research and design capability through state-of-the-art, fully instrumented indoor and outdoor laboratories and access to academic expertise across health, engineering, robotics, software design, psychology, design, and the arts. The AWRC co-designs innovations and undertakes world-leading research that aims to prevent and treat chronic disease by helping people move (see www.shu.ac.uk/awrc).  

For ten years until 2022, Rob was the Director of the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine (NCSEM) in Sheffield. The NCSEM is a 2012 Olympic Legacy programme to improve the health and wellbeing of the nation through sport, exercise and physical activity research and knowledge translation.

Rob's specific area of expertise is physical activity and health, with his current research and knowledge transfer portfolio focusing on designing behaviour change interventions for public health benefit. Rob has over 100 peer reviewed articles and conference contributions, presenting and publishing nationally and internationally on physical activity, health systems and behaviour change and continues to hold this as his main focus of research. 

Rob’s work through the AWRC and NCSEM has received national and international recognition, and has been the catalyst for systems change in Sheffield, including the development and delivery of the city's physical activity strategy - Move More, which Rob authored (see www.movemoresheffield.com/about). Rob has recently been appointed as the psychological and behaviour change lead for a prehabilitation consensus process in partnership with MacMillan, the Royal College of Anaesthetists Perioperative Medicine leadership group and NIHR. Rob's work for the NCSEM also involves the co-location of NHS clinics in 3 leisure centres across the City (delivering 80,000 appointments per annum including surgery schools), enhancing workforce health and wellbeing in the NHS through lifestyle modification programmes, designing active environments and communities as well as developing whole school approaches to physical activity. 

Rob has significant research, consultancy and service evaluation experience in clinical and non-clinical populations and has presented and published nationally and internationally on physical activity and obesity related areas. Rob has been part of the last two REF submissions (2008 and 2014) for Sheffield Hallam University and principle investigator on grants relating to physical activity, obesity, workforce wellness and public health from national and international funding bodies generating over £12.5million in grant income.

Rob is a member of a number of national academic advisory boards and regularly reviews for international peer review journals and research submissions. He was also part of an expert panel (All Party Parliamentary Group) providing insight to national government on the promotion of physical activity and has led expert round-tables for Public Health England in preparation for the national framework on physical activity in the UK. 

In other areas, Rob has worked as a psychologist within a wide range of professional sports including downhill mountain biking, golf, football, and snooker, and he has also worked with chief executives and senior manager's applying sports psychology techniques to a business environment to improve performance under pressure.

• physical activity
• health
• obesity
• sport and exercise psychology
• behaviour change