Research Committee
Marty Hoffman, MD
RESEARCH COMMITTEE CO-DIRECTOR
Dr. Marty Hoffman is former Professor of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at the University of California Davis (retired 2023), former Chief of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at the VA Northern California Health Care System (retired 2020), former Director of Research for the Western States Endurance Run (2006-16), former team physician for the US Biathlon Association (1988-95), and Chief Medical Officer for the Ultra Medical Team. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed publications mainly related to applied exercise physiology, focusing on human locomotion, human performance, and exercise-associated hyponatremia. His clinical work has involved cardiac rehabilitation, musculoskeletal medicine, and sports medicine. He has been a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine since 1989 and serves on multiple editorial boards. He has been a competitive cross-country skier or distance runner for most of his life and still enjoys exploring his limits… though at a much slower pace than in the past, and often with a fly rod in hand.
David Oxborough, PhD
RESEARCH COMMITTEE CO-DIRECTOR
Dr. David Oxborough is a Professor of Echocardiography and Cardiovascular Physiology at Liverpool John Moores University. He is co-chair of the Education Committee of the British Society of Echocardiography being lead author on professional guidelines for the use of echocardiography in the athlete whilst contributing to numerous others. He is also the Past-Chair of the Consortium for Accrediting Sonographic Education in the UK and acts as a lead accreditor for ultrasound education programs nationwide. As an academic and researcher, David has published over 130 peer-reviewed papers on echocardiography and its applications in Clinical and Exercise Cardiology. He has continuously worked in the imaging-based assessment of sudden cardiac death syndromes and pre-participation screening environment and has screened over 7000 athletes. He has continued to study the impact of endurance exercise on the heart and has traveled to endurance and ultra-endurance events across the globe to gain further insight into the acute cardiac effects of prolonged strenuous exercise and subsequent chronic adaptation. His work continues to explore this unique group of athletes aiming to answer the question as to whether too much exercise can be deleterious.
Guido Ferrari, MD
Dr. Guido Ferrari is Professor of Surgery and Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Duke University Medical Center. He has also been the Medical Director of Umstead 100 since 2013. His field of interest is immune responses against viral infection and vaccinology in healthy and immunocompromised individuals. He has published over 200 manuscripts covering HIV-1, CMV, TB, HCV, and SARS-CoV-2 infections and vaccines. He also loves exercise physiology. After years of skimo in the Alps, he started marathon running in 1991, when he moved to North Carolina, and ultra-distance running in 1994. He started his volunteering work in 2005 for Umstead 100 and has been working to give back to the running community since then.
Eric Goulet, PhD
Dr. Eric Goulet is a professor of exercise physiology at the Université de Sherbrooke, Canada, where he is also head of the performance, hydration and thermoregulation laboratory and director of the PhD program in Science of Physical Activity. His research interests include 1) the impact of dehydration, heat stress, ad libitum drinking and hyperhydration on physical performance, water balance and physiological functions; 2) the validation of devices or techniques aimed at measuring performance, core temperature or sodium concentration in sweat and; 3) the conduct of systematic reviews for improving our understanding of the impact of body water changes on physical performance. He is a member of the science advisory board of the Korey Stringer Institute and the Institut National du Sport du Québec. He earned his PhD in physiology from the Université de Sherbrooke and completed a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship in physiology at the McGill Nutrition and Food Science Center, McGill University, in Canada. He has published over 60 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals, along with two book chapters. He has reviewed papers for more than 50 scientific journals. In his leisure time, he enjoys running, cycling and swimming and has completed over 50 long-distance triathlons.
James Jastifer, MD
Dr. James Jastifer is a board-certified orthopaedic surgeon and the Chief of Orthopaedic Surgery at Ascension Borgess Hospital in Kalamazoo, MI. He is also a biomedical engineer and has additional fellowship training in foot and ankle reconstruction which is the focus of a majority of his clinical practice. Dr. Jastifer is a Clinical Associate Professor at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Western Michigan University. He has published numerous articles and textbook chapters and serves in several leadership positions, including the NFL’s Musculoskeletal Committee. Most importantly, he is an active ultramarathon runner with a passion for the science of ultra-endurance sports.
Guillaume Millet, PhD
Dr. Guillaume Millet is a professor at Jean Monnet University in Saint-Etienne. From 1998 to 2013, he held various academic positions in France, including a 4-year full-time research contract at the French National Institute for Medical Research (INSERM). In 2013, he moved to the University of Calgary where he directed a research team of ~15 trainees, the Neuromuscular Fatigue Lab. He also was Vice-Chair Research of the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology from 2014 to 2016. Back to France in 2018, he received a very competitive IDEXLYON fellowship (1.16 million €), a program that aims to attract outstanding scientists with a strong international track record and was asked to lead the ActiFS (Physical Activity, Fatigue, Health) academic chair. Guillaume was named at the ‘Institut Universitaire de France’ as a Senior member in 2019 and he had been the director of the inter-university Laboratory of Human Movement Biology. His general research area investigates the physiological, neurophysiological and biomechanical factors associated with fatigue, both during extreme exercise and in patients (neuromuscular diseases, cancer, ICU). His research is focusing on understanding fatigue in order to create tailored rehabilitation programs for clinical populations and enhance patients’ quality of life. As of October 2021, he had published 285 journal articles (cited > 12,700 times) and his H index was 61. He has supervised 41 postdoctoral fellows and PhD students coming from 13 different countries and he served as an external reviewer for over 60 PhD candidates. Guillaume has been an invited speaker 155 times in 17 different countries. Guillaume has practiced various endurance sports in competition (e.g. ultra-trail running, cross-country skiing, adventure races) for 30 years. Among other results, he placed 3 times in the top 6 at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc®. He has published 5 books on physiology or training in endurance sports. He just published the second edition of his book “Ultra-trail, plaisir, performance et santé” (12,000 copies of the first edition were sold).
Rob Shave, PhD
Dr. Rob Shave is the Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Health and Social Development at The University of British Columbia. He is known for his work examining the acute and chronic effects of exercise and/or environmental stress upon the heart. Using echocardiography and biomarkers, Dr. Shave and his colleagues have provided insight to the beneficial and potentially negative effects of endurance, and ultra-endurance, exercise upon the heart, and the influence of exercise on cardiac remodeling and the ventricular mechanics that underpin cardiac function in health and disease. In addition, Dr. Shave established the International Primate Heart Project to examine heart disease in great apes and to provide insight into the evolution of the human heart. Dr. Shave’s work combines comparative and experimental physiology approaches to further understand structural and functional cardiovascular adaptations to exercise in a range of populations with a specific focus on human evolution and the potential of cardiovascular mismatch disease. Prior to his academic career, Dr. Shave was a physiologist with the British Olympic Medical Centre and was co-organizer of the annual London Marathon Science and Medicine conference for ~10 years.
Rhiannon Snipe, PhD, APD, AdvSD
Dr. Rhiannon Snipe is an advanced sports dietitian and Lecturer in Sports Nutrition with the School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences at Deakin University in Australia. Her PhD topic explored exertional heat stress induced gastrointestinal perturbations and nutrition related prevention strategies. Rhiannon’s current research interests include sports nutrition for female athletes with a specific focus on menstrual cycle and hormonal contraceptive effects on nutrition requirements, health and performance. She is a former competitive long-distance triathlete and an avid long-distance runner who aspires to improve her ultramarathon times, particularly over the 100km distance.
Christa Janse van Rensburg, DMed
Dr. Christa Janse van Rensburg is a Specialist in Physical Medicine and Rheumatology and a Sport and Exercise Medicine Professor at the University of Pretoria. She is a Founder Member of the newly established College of Sport and Exercise Medicine in South Africa. She is the past President of the South African Sports Medicine Association, a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine and a selected Member of the Scientific Committee of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) World Conference on Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport (Monaco, 2021 and 2024). She is also a board member of the medical committee of World Netball, a member of FIFA’s Consensus Meeting on the methodology of injury and illness surveillance, and part of the International Tennis Federation’s Classification Science Advisory Group. She has published 128 peer-reviewed publications and 4 book chapters, with a 5th on its way. Her current research focus encompasses the effects of travel on athletes, the epidemiology of injuries and illness in different sporting disciplines such as trail running and netball, and the effect of exercise on patients suffering from arthritic diseases. She has reviewed more than 100 manuscripts and serves on multiple editorial boards. She delivered keynote addresses at several conferences and lectured for the Royal Society of Medicine. She accompanied many sports teams as a sports physician, both nationally and internationally. In her private capacity, she is an animal lover and an avid sports fan, both as a spectator and participant. She played national-level netball and completed the Comrades ultra-race and 10 Argus Cycle Tours.
Gianluca Vernillo, PhD
Dr. Gianluca Vernillo is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Sciences for Health at the University of Milan (Italy), and a former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, under the supervision of Prof. Guillaume Millet, at the Human Performance Laboratory in the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary (Canada). Gianluca completed his PhD at the University of Milan examining the physiological and performance profile of endurance athletes. During his PhD, he actively collaborated with Kenyan marathon runners during the four-year period leading to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Most recently, he was the head of strength and conditioning for the Italian snowboard and freestyle team in the four-year period preceding the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games. His research interests lie in the areas of the neurophysiological and biomechanical changes associated with running and ultra-running and the physiological and performance profile of snowboarding. In recent years, his work has focused on better understanding the neuromuscular fatigue in response to exercise, particularly on the inter-limb differences. In addition, he is exploring the neurophysiological and biomechanical changes after graded running exercises.
We thank Kristin Stuempfle, PhD and Bob Weiss, MD for many years of service to the committee to 2023.