 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This evening I am delighted to welcome Professor Conor Gassan, Academic Director for Research in the School of Sport, Health and Applied Science at St. Mary's University. And we're here for Conor's inaugural lecture. I'm also delighted to welcome Conor's wife Claire and his mother Catherine who have joined us here this evening and are duly proud of all of Conor's achievements which we will celebrate here tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, Conor began his career at the West London Institute of Higher Education. Whilst there he began investigating the epidemiology of sport-related injury initially in Rugby League. But to prepare him for the West London Institute of Higher Education he did his initial studies here at St. Mary's. And that's why we are particularly pleased to be able to welcome him back here this evening. Conor, since that time at the West London Institute has undertaken a number of research collaborations with renowned institutions including Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and the Irish Rugby Football Union amongst many others. Having returned to St. Mary's as a staff member in 2001 as a visiting lecturer whilst completing his PhD at Brunel University Conor then became a senior lecturer in 2006 and reader in 2010. Conor began his latest position as Academic Director for Research in September 2016 and also serves as Chair of the University's Ethics Committee. Conor's research has been published extensively in renowned journals covering sports injury and rehabilitation and he is making a major contribution to raising the profile of concussion and head injuries in sport in his work with the International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation. Conor's school, SHAS, is internationally recognised for excellence in research and progressing academic thought. The sports sciences are making real changes to sport at all levels. They are improving performances and streamlining training programmes helping athletes find that extra 1% to succeed. They are also changing our understanding of the role nutrition teaching athletes how to fuel themselves for peak performance. And as we will hear from Conor, they are reforming responses and treatments for sports injuries and understanding how sport can be made safer for everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured that at St. Mary's our sports science research under Conor's directorship is contributing to this global discussion. Conor, we are very proud of all of your achievements and join you this evening with your family to celebrate your inaugural lecture. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Professor Conor. Thank you very much indeed. I'm probably just going to rattle on about what I've done for about the last 30 years and robbed a living off the various universities. So we'll take it from there. My first time I got involved in research was while I was here at St. Mary's. It was... We were in the third year, there were two of us. There was myself and my good friend Gareth, who I'm very pleased to see is here this evening. And we were supervised by Angela, a come in, who used to work here. And we did sort of various projects. It wasn't compulsory back then. There were just a few avid people who wanted to do them and myself and Gareth were two of those. Angela was there. She's very fond of telling us that she supervises in between getting us out of trouble, which is probably very true. But we did it. There wasn't that many people who did it, as I said, but we did well enough that Angela volunteered, as Stroke said, would you like to go and present your work somewhere? So we said, yeah. And we arranged to sort of go to a conference, a student conference at Carnegie and Leeds. The only problem with that was it just happened to be that we had to be there. It was on the morning after the day we left university. And we've all left university before, and you know what you spend the day doing. So myself and Gareth rocked up and got the milk train out of King's Cross at some time, silly o'clock at night. I think it was about 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock. We were picked up at the station, and in those days you didn't type your overheads, you wrote them out by hand. So at three in the morning or whatever it was, we wrote our overheads out by hand. So not a lot of sleep there. We must have done something right because we both decided to carry on researching. Gareth is now head of department at Swansea University, and I haven't done that bad if Francis says all those nice things about me. It was. We did. We enjoyed it and we got stuck into it. From there, I went on to Purdue University and did my master's degree, and then I went and got a job at the West London Institute. I was in a few research projects back then. I began to learn a bit about computer programming, but there was nothing that I was all that serious about. I did some sort of learning software for physiotherapy training and some research methods stuff. But let's take you forward to June 1990. The lady up there is my good friend D Jennings. He was sitting in the audience tonight, and I'll tell you a story, and I don't think I would have got anywhere near like as far without this. I was on the coaching staff at Fulham Rugby League Club, as it was then, for you youngsters. That's now London Broncos, and it's had about three different names in between. And I was on the coaching staff, and we got a new doctor, who's D, and she just, and I hope I've got this right, she just passed her apothecary certificate in sports medicine. And it was done at St Bart's Hospital. It was, I'm all right in saying it's one of the first ones, the first sports medicine certificates. And she came along, and she was very enthusiastic and wanted to be involved. She'd done some rugby union before, but she wanted to be involved in the Rugby League Club. What happened was, I think, we were introduced by the head coach, a guy called Ross Strubbwick, and I've got to thank him for the sort of putting us in the same spots. We had to talk to each other. They asked and said, can you get me some of the latest research on Rugby League? And I said, yeah, not a problem. I went to find it, and it was all about five years old, probably some of the other stuff, older than that. And somewhere in the conversation after we had this, we decided, well, if we haven't got it, and there isn't research out there, then we should do our own. It lasted, I think, the first paper came out in about... 1993. And the last one came out about 2012. There were, I think, about 21 of them. I kept losing count, but it was a very, very fruitful relationship, which sort of pays dividends. It was symbiotic in a lot of ways. We couldn't have done it without each other. You have to be a medical professional to diagnose a sports injury by definition, and all that other stuff about the writing and accounting, the stuff I could do quite well. So it worked very well indeed. De-maintained that register for 13 years, and, well, without that, I wouldn't be standing here today. Also, maintaining that register allowed us to address research problems that they present themselves. For example, the ability to document injury risks when rugby league moved from the winter to the summer. At some point in 1996, when we decided about 1995, they decided they were going to play it in the summer months, and it was going to be a better game and a better spectacle. It was, but you can't set experiments up to do that. If you're not there collecting the data in the first place, you're just going to miss it. We were fortunate that we were there, and we were doing it. We were told also it's going to be a safer game in the summer. That's not what we found. We found the injury risk basically doubled, which was fairly scary at the time, but we live and we learn. We've also got things like we were the first to ever report on academy level rugby league injuries. We also looked at it from a health and safety perspective, which gave us one of the SOPrize from the Society of Occupational Medicine in 2004. I might get used to this by the end. Adding additional studies was also incredibly easy. Once we started this, we were given the barrier of doing it in the first place. It was quite easy to actually attempt things and actually bring them home. One medical and performance issue was always a problem. When they moved it to summer, it had been played in the winter and people played in the snow and the rain and things like that, and then all of a sudden they were getting asked to play in temperatures about 25, 26, 27 degrees, sometimes even higher. It was a real problem. Our players hydrated. Are they dehydrated? How is it going to affect everything? At the beginning it wasn't so much of a problem. In the early years of SOPrize, I must add to that, they also decided they were going to move some of the amateur competitions as well. Right to the summer at the same time. There wasn't really any guidance on how to do it. They just let people come on with water whenever they felt like it. It doesn't take much on that to change it because then they start running on. Winning is important as John Charlie was telling me earlier today. It's the most important thing of all. Players were running on with water and they were doing things like coaching for coaching and a lot of other things and stuff like that. The rugby league got savvy to this. It did take them about two and a half years in all honestly. But they wanted to do the control of referees. They wanted to stop people running onto the pitch. That wasn't good enough. We belonged to an organisation called the Rugby League Medical Association and we had a good long... There was a meeting, I can't remember where it was, but we had a meeting which was discussed was what can they do about this. The guy who was the chairman of it was a gentleman called Chris Ragh and he went back to the rugby league to protest about this change that he wanted to make and the problem looked right and he pointed out and as part of that he took with him, there was an article that we produced that was showing that players were losing somewhere between two and a half and three percent of body weight is getting to the point where it's dangerous and we must remember this was when people were allowed to sort of free access to water whenever they could get it and they were still getting dehydrated by very large amounts. So he... So Chris Ragh went with... which effectively turned out to be a risk assessment and as a result of that what we got was there was a thing and it's still in the rugby league bylaws and the way this works is if you're at amateur level the referee will just stop the game after 20 minutes if they decide it's hot enough they'll get together and have a chat about it and they'll just stop the game in the middle of it. It is written in the rugby league bylaws it's very unnerving you also got things in there like you used to get a guy you get a referee told, would tell somebody on the academy team that your side's going to knock the ball on after 20 minutes right and they look very strange at you like he's going to do something to you but all he wanted to do was just get the break in the game so you get the water in there it is more important to have healthy players than anything else and this was there and it's been there all the way through and it's still there it was in about 2012 it's still in there they still take this very seriously as a result of some research that was done by us by D by a son Simon from there we've moved on the research skills I've learnt and there was back in the days where we didn't have the internet to begin with I am that old you had to go and hunt them out and you can't find books that told me how to do certain things they were a lot fewer and a lot further between but any skills I learnt were very easy to transfer to other sports I did that with a number of things the first one I've got up there was a lady on the far side from Trinity College Dublin her name is Fiona Wilson and she invited me to be involved it was interesting I did all the analysis on it and for whatever reason I ended up deciding to say to Fiona can I write this thing so I wrote the article and then I had this idea inside my head that it wasn't much use if it was written and it came out of the University in London it would be much better if it came out of the University in Ireland so I put my name and the last author on it and I sent it back so I was very very pleased with that the only mistake that was gone that it got accepted it got accepted first time round simply because it says up there the only mistake I could find it was me spelling Lenster rum and I don't know if I spelled it right today that could be rum but I was very very pleased with that one that moved on and the lady in this bottom corner here Catherine Blake is at UCD it doesn't seem to be a rivalry between the two universities they quite happily worked together and I got involved with with Catherine Blake who just received some money from the GAA for a very big study which I think it finished last year but collected data for a number of years it provided many opportunities that relationship allowed me to produce in conjunction with them another 11 articles I got my first PhD student on the back of that a lady called Ed Wiener O'Malley who's since graduated and I hope he's off somewhere in gainful employment and there's that the gentleman on the far side of the bottom over there is a guy who's a current PhD student on that project there's a guy called Mark Rowe I believe he was a student here once upon a time and wasn't he your tenant JP or something like that JP here he was JP's drinker JP's not here then he was JP's drinking buddy for about a year while he was staying went on for that I never strayed very far from the rugby league I think it's my sport I'm into it we got together this was a very curious relationship we have three people there Lisa Hodgson who's here this evening Doug King is a Kiwi and I do hope there's a picture of a guy down there who I think is Tim Gabbard but James is nodding his head I wasn't sure because I've never met a Kiwi however I'll tell you a bit more originally we decided to sort of put a paper together it was about a consensus paper on what should be collected when we were doing a study in rugby league at the time it was very fashionable they did them in football they did them in rugby, they did them in tennis they did them in lots of different things I suppose we've just jumped on a bandwagon really on that one originally there were six of us and we had a row about what constitutes the definition of an injury so two of them dropped out there you go things to fight over the definition of injury it's got a rank as one of the silliest ever but four of us sat together and we did the work and we completed this work on what it should be and what we thought you should collect and we also did another paper which was on the influence that the definition of injury had and what it looked like what it did to your injury rates at the end both of these papers I've got to say as I said I've never met Tim Gabbard we did it all by email Lisa and I could talk on the phone because Lisa was up in Yorkshire at the time I was in London and I've never met Tim this day and Doug first time I met him was October last year and this was all going on about a good eight, ten years ago everything had to be done by email that was the method of communication however it was very fruitful I did a research with both Doug and Lisa and I hope one day we'll actually meet Tim Gabbard when I was putting this together Ross Wady said I want to see plenty of fluffy qualitative research in this and this is the best I can imagine but apart from writing methods papers I actually proposed an injury model once upon a time and this is as fluffy as it gets and then Ross sent me an email this morning saying he couldn't make it he said something about Phoebe not being very well and I'm going to point out that it's his daughter and not his PhD student but that's what he said as an epidemiologist I like numbers I like statistics, things like that but we put this together what this did do, thinking back about it and I probably haven't thought about it in a couple of years what I thought has to go into things like this and how you investigate things and if you want to go through qualitative research I'm starting to take my hat off to you and I'm starting to understand how much easier it is with numbers I take my hat off to you like I still think you're all wrong but I'll take my hat off to you a natural extension on this sort of basically going concussion is a natural extension after you've been looking at sports injuries it's fairly straightforward in that you have the tools to do it at your disposal also I was very fortunate in that all that to do was like the people who I was involved with were also very keen to sort of look in this area so we've done an awful lot of this over the years what we have there the guys at the top in New Zealand there's a lady called Patrick Hume a gentleman called Trevor Clark and Doug King he'll keep coming back all the way through this this Doug King user I've done some with rugby league with a lady called Lisa Hodgson and I've had two PhD students David and Derbler who have been known to me as the minions over the years it's not the easiest thing to do concussion research Neuroscience has been described as the last barrier in medicine so investigations in concussion they're going to take an awful long time the processes involved are very broad and they are subject to much debate it's an area that needs to accumulate an awful lot of evidence before it's going to go somewhere when it does that it's going to be able to diagnose effectively effective long term treatment for an awful lot of things but the sad fact that this is the state of knowledge is at the moment I'm afraid there's going to be an awful lot more people banged on the head before we get some proper answers it's a sad fact I'm afraid moving along the research links with New Zealand have proved very very interesting gentlemen in the big picture on the far side over there the one without the gum shield in his mouth is a guy called Doug King and he asked me to be on his supervisory team for his second PhD and his second PhD was going to be in sports or a concussion it's something that he's really passionate about because I don't know if this happened to anybody else but he actually did have he went to attend summer at the side of a rugby pitch he was a concussed and the guy died in his arms which is fairly sad but nonetheless Doug's very passionate about it he's a top class researcher in the field and his work has had great influence he gets introduced as the dumbest bloke in the world when he stands up to speak simply because he was dumb enough to do two PhDs when I met him in October he was talking about going around for a third time so yeah I'll give him is the dumbest bloke in the world also he does put that in the bottom of his emails PhD squared which I think is there's quite an accolade to the fact that you were able to do that the data is collected he's provided extensive validation of things like the King David concussion test he was using and we published research on the X2 Biopatch which is down in this bottom corner here that's in my hand he was publishing on that long before Saracen's first start wearing them they were out and before they were talking about it in the news that they might in danger plays he had research out on the subject it can be worn in one or two ways it can either go under gum shield as that gentleman shown in the picture there or you can put it behind your ear it's a very small piece on Catherine Blake's young son he was only about five years old when it was on there so it's a very small unobtrusive piece of equipment which can record every knock to the head that a person takes which is data that we need to answer this question on concussion we need to know about the forces involved what it takes to cause a concussion and also a very interesting area what happens over a rugby career or a football career how many impacts can you take before you start to show the wear and tear of this it hasn't all been plain sailing though as I say there's enough about him to go around twice doing a PhD I don't think he's going to go around a third time but he's certainly investigated the possibility it's been a challenge at some point he doesn't like for example he does not mind upsetting an entire rugby union he will quite happily do that he went on one occasion he went on the radio to speak about his research and Doug got all excited he wanted to speak about the stuff he was doing now rather than stuff that had already been published and there was the medical officer in the New Zealand Rugby Union who actually got obliterated on the show so the New Zealand Rugby Union came back to sort of accuse him of using a data that was not peer reviewed and apparently that was bad all Doug did was get excited it's been published now it still stands up and they basically came back to Patrick Hume demanding that he should be sacked as a PhD student and all these supervisors one of whom was myself should resign immediately so I ended up in a Skype call with this lady at three o'clock in the morning and she said to me we should sack him as a PhD student no we should resign immediately as supervisors she said I'm glad you feel about that that's the way I feel about it work was too important we wanted to keep it going we had to keep him as far away from the New Zealand Rugby Union as we possibly could but nevertheless he went back and he finished his work moving forward shortly after he defended his PhD I think it was about September two years ago and I was off somewhere and I received a text from him if I could take a Skype call with him in about ten minutes time I was on holiday with my with my wife and I was in Spain and we were in a hotel room at the time and I text back and said I haven't got a computer I can't take a Skype call so he then texts back and he said to me and his text said that the New Zealand Rugby Union now wanted to incorporate his research in their new concussion policy so I text back straight away asking him if he was dreaming he assured me that it was true and some of the procedures they wanted they wanted to adopt things that he'd done and he'd found through his research and now some of the stuff he does is part of their rugby smart project which is investigating rugby player health at the amateur level which before everybody used to look at everything that went on a professional level because it was much easier to quantify but now they're looking at the lower levels of the game and the project is now going international and there's someone doing the work at Leeds Beckett University I also have to give that man a special thanks as I said I met him for the first time in October but throughout all time I've ever known him my PhD students have had a question David and Derbler he's always been there the email await that they can contact him and he will help them out whenever possible but when John Brewer did his inaugural address he was able to speak about the marathons he's running his triumphs and his interactions with international sports teams well I haven't got near that not really so I'm going to rattle on for a few minutes about some of the things I've done in sport as many of you know I do like swimming I do like swimming outdoors there's pictures there of Swim at Windermere and there's pictures there of the Channel Swim that up there is a colleague of mine Anaheer who wanted to model my hoodie from the event I don't know why I can't remember cause I'm into this open water swimming you get up early you go and train in lakes and there was I think last Saturday we managed about 23 minutes at 7 degrees the water was or something like that but you do get some good things out of it for the people who when I swam up at Windermere the people at some marys on their own raced about £1000 in sponsorship for me thank you to you all and that was donated to the Trust as far as swimming the Channel goes the greatest bit about it is that you get invited to a dinner at the end of it in Dovertown Hall it's the march after you've done it and after dinner they take you they take you in this pub called the White Horse and you get locked in alright it gets even better one thing Landlord does he puts a point in one hand and he puts a marker pen in the other and he basically says go and sign your name somewhere on my wall or my pub and the time it took you to swim across so you get to go in there you get to graffiti here if you ever go back there you get to show people and it's incredible after about 27 lagers how bad your signature is but there you are it's still there I did it I've got a colleague who swam a guy who swam with me one of my teammates took his two lads to see it and they said and they just commented on how poor his handwriting was but then again he had 13 lagers or whatever I'll come back to rugby league again I coached rugby league for 20 years at various levels right I enjoyed it and if I could still do it I probably still would it's given me an awful lot in life the best of which is my wife Claire over there who I found at St Helens I've done an awful lot of it and that is the best thing all the researchers side standing this evening best thing I got this is a picture of my good friend there's a guy called Chris Richards he was he was a sergeant in the Royal Marines when I coached them and he also ended up being a captain he captained my Royal Marines and England Lion Hearts team I'm not saying he was a best player over coach but it was a dream because in about six years of coaching him that guy missed two tackles which is fairly rare and every coach would love a player like that this one I've got to talk about this one the most fun days out I've ever been on ever those guys were Royal Marines rugby league team and they were in July 2000s their first inaugural match the parachute regiment and the Royal Marines and it was quite something and it's memorable for a lot of reasons apart from the fact there was some rugby play it was in Aldershop and it was in the stadium right next to the what was then the first battalion's home base and I was in there and we were looking out and we saw the entire battalion a group of about 500 men marching down the road so we stood and we watched and they stopped that side of the stadium and came in that was the crowd in full combat combat uniforms never seen anything like that happen before probably never going to see it again I was standing there with my the team manager the gentleman called Fes Wood who's over there this evening, good evening Fes he's a Falklands war veteran so he's seen an awful lot of strange things in life but the next thing that happened after that after we got the team out and all these women turned up with their hair dyed maroon threatening killers, do you remember that one it was like it was like nothing else I've never come across it before now I've just I've said about how to crowd march the parachute region march the crowd in we couldn't manage anything like that on the marine side every single commando unit was away somewhere like Bosnia or somewhere like that at the time and all we could must of the support were about 40 very young guys got themselves hurt in training they all came in they were 40, they were all netines I'll take well over half of them were on crutches and that's what we managed after the pomp and circumstance of the parachute regiment coming in this is what we could we could must of in another walk of life we just called them the sick lame and lazy but they were they were about to have a very good day out too the marines won the game 36-0 it's important I tell you this at this point in the proceedings and for most of the first half 100 troops sat there in a stand and they really didn't know how to behave because they were all youngsters till in training there was all these guys around them who were sort of like quite a few war veterans and things like that and people they sort of aspire to be but just not wear the same beret so they must have sat there feeling some were sort of fair and awe of the people around them but as we started the game progressed they got they got courage which was really good to see the more points the marines scored the braver they got and they took over and winning as John was saying John Charlie was saying upstairs it is the only thing as we scored more points they got braver and braver and braver and listening to trying to get the parachute regiments to join in the chorus if you're losing 18 they'll clap your hands ah and Harry was very very funny and instead of just being youngsters who had to sit there and take it they got to be youngsters uncrushes giving it out it was quite a sight to behold and the point about all of this it was the first one and if you go first and you do something first no one ever gets to take it away from you it's important just talking about the future I've got a few years left for a retire as you know I do know exactly the day I'm going to retire 4 years 10 months in the next 4 years 10 months the concussion research is going to continue and the rugby injury research is going to continue I've got the links with the projects up here look Ed, rugby has just come at fruition which is again working again with my old buddy where I started Gareth Stratten down in Swansea the UK health project which has brought the international one that started off in New Zealand and there's a little organisation called the International Concussion and Head Invery Research Foundation and that's just about start producing some data on retired jockeys and give us the opportunity to start looking at the long term effects of receiving head injuries see what effect it has does it influence dementia stuff like that it's on jockeys because quite simply the jockeys got organised long before anybody else and they've been collecting data on injured jockeys for 20 years more than that and they've also got stuff about and they know where they all are now so they can track them long term I also get to write regularly on statistics and the education involved in it and the statistics understanding something keeps me very very happy but some time ago as was alluded to earlier by Francis I became the academic director so it's not all going to be about my research it's about getting other people to do research they haven't yet these people haven't decided some of them haven't decided they want to or they're going to be dragged but it is about me helping other people out it's going to be an ongoing process and it's something we've got to continue to continually strive to do better and better on I think a school of our size and this is a conversation I had with Jamie the other day I think we do very well and we produce some good research the more we produce the better the situation is going to be behind me is a list of everybody in our school who's got PhD and very soon others are going to join them we meet to make the most of what we've got and we're in a situation now where we've got all the PhD students we've got I think they're a thoroughly good bunch of people and I do admire their work attitude when we've got them and they're producing meta-analysis and systematic reviews for high-ranking journals I think we've got a very good basis to begin with we've now got something and this is ongoing conversations I'm having at various places around the university we've got some research modules in the M-RES and I'm trying to negotiate with other parts of the university to get the taught modules and what I'd like them to be is we can have a research certificate that's at the same standing as a teaching certificate is in this place I think they're vital skills I think they're very important because if you think about if you're going to lead a professional life 10 years down the road with the skills you will need to equip yourself to educate yourself in the future so I think that's really important also on top of this it's not a bad idea if you're people doing courses people who know how to run systematic reviews and meta-analysis and things like randomised clinical trials and they've had like 8-10 hours of tuition on them they can help us out in a lot of different ways so I think they're very worthwhile having we are building up our external collaborations some recent ones Fullham Football Club London Irish Royal Ballet and our research does very well in certain areas such as skill acquisition occlusion training and nutrigenomics we do excel in those areas in short I think what we've got is we've got the raw materials to push on in our particular school and there are negotiations and discussions going on about the background, about extending our sort of provision for PhDs and stuff like that but I think it's very important and I am one of these people I will always be going on about how important research is not just producing it we have to get our graduates if they go out and they never return to talk they're still going to be consumers of a research they've got to know how to interpret it and do their practice the best it can be done I get to stand here tonight and I wouldn't have got here without an awful lot of people an awful lot of people along the way I mentioned a lot as I was going along that I've gone and I've worked for over the years but there are others who haven't included in the presentation I haven't got to list their names here in front of me but I need to thank them as well I need to thank lots of different people most of all if you're doing injury research you set the whole thing up and you run this really big risk of having no data nobody gets hurt, you haven't got anything there's something you've got to prepare yourself for it hasn't happened yet I've got to say thank you without all these people I've come across over the years who are brave enough to have bodies on the line I would have had nothing whatsoever to write about ever ladies and gentlemen thank you