Keynote speaker

Ulf Ekelund is professor in Physical Activity and Health at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and hold a secondary position as senior researcher in physical activity and public health at the Norwegian Public Health Institute (20%). Before moving to the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in 2012, Ulf lead a research program in physical activity epidemiology at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, UK.

Ulfs main research areas include assessment of physical activity and sedentary time; patterns and trends in population levels of physical activity; and the role of sedentary time and physical activity for preventing chronic diseases. This research include some landmark publications including the development and validation of the IPAQ (MSSE 2003; >10000 citations), The description of the global levels of physical activity (The Lancet 2012); the associations between physical activity and cardio-metabolic risk markers in children, an association independent of sedentary time (JAMA 2012); the association between physical activity, TV-viewing and metabolic risk in young people (PLOS Med 2007); the attenuating or eliminating effect of physical activity on the association between sitting time and mortality (The Lancet; Altmetric #16 in 2016), the associations between physical activity, adiposity and all-cause mortality (AJCN 2015, Altmetric #74 in 2015) and the association between device-measured physical activity and sedentary time with mortality (Ekelund et al, BMJ 2019; Altmetric #84, 2019).

Ulf has published more than 470 original research publications since 2000.

Key Note Lecture

The topic for the key note lecture is “Physical Activity and Health: Myths, Facts and New Perspectives”.