Professor Vicky Tolfrey

Vicky Tolfrey, Professor of Applied Disability Sport and Director of the Peter Harrison Centre for Disability Sport at Loughborough University, is an international leader in the field of spinal cord injury (SCI) and Para sport. Through the Institute of Advanced Studies, Professor Tolfrey has brought seven international scholars to the University as IAS Visiting Fellows since 2017: Professors Rory A. Cooper (University of Pittsburgh), Jan Lexell (Lund University), Kathleen Martin Ginis (University of British Columbia) and Brett Smith (University of Birmingham, now Durham), and Drs Sonja de Groot (Groningen University, now Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Sven Hoekstra (University of Texas, San Antonio) and Alexandra Rauch (Hochschule Futwangen University, now World Health Organization).

The research collaborations led by Tolfrey and the IAS Fellows have resulted in nearly two dozen co-authored publications, international grant success, and prestigious awards in recognition of the global impact this research has had on the lives of people living with spinal cord injury. With Martin Ginis, Lexell, De Groot and others, Tolfrey developed scientific exercise guidelines for adults with spinal cord injury in 2018, launching the guidelines at the International Spinal Cord Society (ISCoS) annual meeting in Dublin. The work was awarded the Spinal Cord Readers’ Choice Award for best review paper published in 2018 and the guidelines were translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish. In 2019, Tolfrey, Martin Ginis and Dr Jan van der Scheer, supported by a successful Kyoten Grant, extended the research to include a systematic review of the Asian literature, the results of which enabled culturally-validated guidelines to be published in Japanese, Thai and Indonesian in 2021. The impact of the SCI exercise guidelines is on-going; 2023 saw the production of an infographic and educational video co-produced with leading wheelchair sports charity WheelPower and the Sheffield Spinal Injury Centre.

Tolfrey’s dynamic research into spinal cord injury extends to co-publications on assistive technology (with Cooper) and internationally-recognised applied research that demonstrates the significance of sport science to elite para athletes. In 2017, Tolfrey was presented with the IPC Paralympic Scientific Award and in 2021, she was honoured by the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology for her contribution to science and Para sport. Her longstanding work with elite wheelchair rugby players has developed more recently into research with elite wheelchair tennis players, in partnership with Wimbledon.

Commenting on the role of the IAS in extending her already well-established international research networks, Tolfrey focuses on the time and space to experiment with ideas:

"I already had the networks, but I think it’s very very important not just to meet people at a conference or via teams or zoom. I think it’s important to be connecting with them for two or three days to look at your portfolio … I think it's a bigger picture - you know, blue sky, horizon scanning…"

Tolfrey’s success consolidates a career spent making a difference to people’s lives through sport science and international research. At the IAS, we are pleased to have been able to support an aspect of this important work and we look forward to Professor Tolfrey’s continued research, innovation and impact in the field.