Dr. Alkhatib is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, an accredited UK nutritionist (RNutr), a clinical physiologist and a certified international sports nutritionist (CISSN). He is also a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (FHEA), and his PhD and MSc in Exercise Sciences from the University of Essex. Dr. Alkhatib has a distinguished academic career spanning over twenty years in the fields of sport and exercise science, health and nutrition.

 

Dr. Alkhatib is currently the Head of Sport and Exercise Science Division at Abertay University in the UK following his tenures at several senior academic positions including those in the UK at Sheffield Hallam, Lincoln, Essex, Suffolk, Greenwich and Middlesex, and internationally when he developed a Sport Science Department in Qatar. Dr. Alkhatib is widely published in his field and almost 100 publications and has won several excellence research and academic awards. His current research focuses on novel nutritional and exercise based intervention strategies for weight loss, disease prevention and enhancing exercise performance.

 

In this study, only 10% of participants met the Tudor-Locke et al.pedometer based cut-offs for health at baseline. The intervention was more expansive than those studies using this model previously. The intervention was longer than other previous work (6 weeks) focusing on changing the physical (e.g., equipment (using pedometers and skipping ropes), after school activity clubs) and the social environment (e.g., supportive environment at school and teacher role modelling), peer working (e.g., individual trophies for effort and trophy for class with most weekly steps) and education about „being healthy‟ at school to increase children‟s overall PA patterns. In the Eyre et al. study data were collected pre, during and 6 weeks post intervention.