There’s much to celebrate as Applied Health Sciences (AHS) marks its milestone anniversary, including the roots of three dynamic academic units, and research that’s changed the way we think about health and well-being.
Back in 1966, there was no such thing as university studies in kinesiology.
Instead, there was one course on applied anatomy. It was offered by Canada’s many post-secondary programs in physical education (PE) and was tailored to high-school gym teachers.
At Waterloo, the course was offered as part of a one-year post-degree program in PE. But the young university wanted to expand this offering to a four-year honours degree. And they’d hired a fellow named Norman Ashton to make it happen.
Norm Ashton and the founding of kinesiology at Waterloo
Ashton had spent the early years of his career as a fitness specialist with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). There, among other things, he’d designed the 10BX exercise plan for RCAF women. He’d also worked with military pilots performing long-haul flights and other personnel working in extremely cold climates.
He knew there were dozens of areas that could benefit from professionals trained in the knowledge of human movement and was convinced there was potential in broadening the mandate of PE. He also felt that all people — including those with physical impairment — should be able to study the science of human movement. This was difficult at the time because PE programs required credits in sports skills courses.
Thus, guided by Ashton’s vision, the University of Waterloo established an entirely new interdisciplinary field of study when it launched the world's first department of kinesiology in 1967. A new conversation had begun.
Roots of recreation and leisure studies
At the same time, both federal and provincial governments were becoming aware of the need for infrastructure to encourage physical fitness among all Canadians. They also saw a corresponding need for university-educated professionals to provide leadership in this new arena.
So it was that in that same year that the Ontario government approached both UWaterloo and the University of Ottawa with requests to establish degree programs in recreation.
Lalonde Report inspires new Department of Health Studies
A few years later, in 1974, the federal government released a groundbreaking report on the health of Canadians. Known as the Lalonde Report, it suggested the health of a nation depended on far more than its health-care system. Lifestyle and environmental factors were just as important, and promotion of health and wellness needed to go hand in hand with medical care and intervention.
Leaders in Waterloo’s brand-new kinesiology program saw instantly that this report would be transformative. It heralded a need for a new kind of health research and a new kind of health professional — scientists who could do the research needed to identify how to make real change in health and well-being. They responded by forming another new department: Health Studies, which would eventually become today’s School of Public Health and Health Systems.
Pioneering research inspires changing ideas about health
Waterloo's faculty and students soon began to establish the young university as a world leader in all these areas.
The following section highlights some of this early work and demonstrates how it created the foundation for work being undertaken today.
Ergonomics and gait analysis
Under the guiding hand of Norm Ashton and, later, members of the department’s biomechanics group, ergonomics emerged as an early strength at Waterloo.
Early faculty member Bob Norman and his students worked with the Canadian military to assess the design of fighter-pilot helmets and ground-troop backpacks, taking low-back injury and excessive fatigue into consideration. Later, Bob worked with Richard Wells and many other colleagues on a massive project to reduce absenteeism caused by low-back injury in General Motors' Oshawa plants. Another faculty member, Patrick Bishop worked on sport helmet designs and is still involved with the Canadian Standards Association and sport concussion groups to make sports safer.
This growth in ergonomics strength was accompanied by pioneering work in the use of quantitative data to analyse human movement. This was a major contribution to world knowledge led by Dave Winter.
Winter was recruited from Winnipeg’s Shriners Hospital, where he had worked extensively with children who had cerebral palsy. As part of this work, he had developed early computer analysis of the walking patterns of these children. This in turn led to more effective recommendations for therapy and/or surgery. Winter brought these skills and methods to Waterloo and applied them to many forms of human movement.
Today graduates of Waterloo’s kinesiology program are in senior ergonomics positions around the world, and faculty members continue to generate new knowledge in areas including mobility and aging, prevention of musculoskeletal disorders, back mechanics and more.
Tobacco and other lifestyle threats
Even in the late 1960s, when smoking was still socially acceptable, tobacco researchers knew it was a public-health disaster in the making.
Another of Norm Ashton’s early hires was Allan Best, who was running smoking cessation clinics at the University of British Columbia, based on his dissertation research in Waterloo’s Department of Psychology. The work that Best and his students undertook at Waterloo in the early 1980s caught the attention of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, which then provided millions of dollars for further research into smoking cessation and prevention.
This work eventually led to many of the smoking-cessation strategies we employ today, including cigarette-package warning labels, policies against smoking in public places, and intervention and education programs in schools. Importantly, it also inspired a new research methodology to measure the impact of these interventions.
Today AHS faculty are still world leaders in smoking cessation and prevention, and the research and intervention methods developed to tackle tobacco use are now being used to study obesity, poor diet, physical inactivity, screen time, alcohol use and more.
Recreation and leisure — creating a new definition of health
Early researchers in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies (RLS) focused on how public assets could support healthy, active living. These included Ron Johnson, who investigated how urban spaces are co-opted for recreation (think skateboarding teens), and Paul Eagles, who did early work in outdoor recreation and resource management.
Today’s RLS researchers continue to look at how physical infrastructure can support active living. But they are also broadening the definition of “healthy” to include mental and social well-being.
Current research includes work by Troy Glover and Katie Misener investigating social capital and how it can create more inclusive communities that foster meaningful social connections. Bryan Grimwood looks at landscapes for ethical tourism; Lisbeth Berbary and Corey Johnson study inclusive spaces for LGBTQ+ populations; and Diana Parry researches online communities for women.
Additionally, RLS alumni can now be found across the country leading sport and recreation businesses, managing Canada’s renowned public parks system and employing therapeutic recreation techniques to improve lives in schools, hospitals and long-term care facilities.
New conversations about health and gender
AHS also took early leadership in the study of health and gender. Nancy Theberge and Sue Shaw were pioneers in investigating gender-equity issues surrounding sport, physical activity, health, leisure and other sociological and applied-health arenas.
One of Theberge’s most notable publications was her book Higher Goals: Women’s Ice Hockey and the Politics of Gender, still regarded as groundbreaking in its analysis of women’s experience of sport and struggle to gain acceptance and recognition. Her research was particularly influential in establishing the link between progress towards gender equity in this sphere and gender relations in broader society.
Sue Shaw was among the first scholars to shed light on the androcentric nature of existing leisure research and how the intersection of work, family and leisure is experienced in different ways by women and men. Her work opened opportunities for feminist scholars to examine these issues within a variety of social, cultural and economic situations.
Today Diana Parry researches women’s encounters with menopause, infertility, motherhood, cancer and a host of other issues on the public-health and recreation-and-leisure spectra.
What goes into healthy retirement and aging?
The ‘60s and ‘70s were very youthful times, and retirement and aging were not exactly top-of-mind in public discourse.
But Waterloo already had these issues in its sights, particularly another early researcher named Ron Schlegel. Schlegel was a social psychologist by training, but his true passion was ensuring the dignity and welfare of seniors. He shared this passion with hundreds of students and went on to establish the Schlegel-UW Research Institute for Aging, which continues to produce cutting-edge research in the care of older adults to this day.
AHS faculty members also developed early expertise in Alzheimer’s/dementia, which became another core strength of the Faculty. Today the work of Sherry Dupuis in creating research-based arts performances to educate those living with dementia and their caregivers is changing the way we think about and care for these populations.
Early work by RLS professors Roger Mannell and Jiri Zuzanek provided data on factors contributing to successful retirement. This work later inspired a research partnership with RBC. Today, faculty like Steven Mock are now expanding retirement studies into the LGBTQ+ community, leading a new conversation about inclusivity in public health.
Mannell and Zuzanek’s research used technology of the day (at that time, personal pagers) to collect data, foreshadowing AHS’s newest emerging strength: mobile-health applications and health informatics.
Much to celebrate
These stories represent a small fraction of the impact our faculty, students and alumni have had on making a healthier world — but it’s clear we have much to celebrate.
Congratulations to each of you, and may you continue to be inspired in your own work to make Canada and the world a healthier place to live, work and play. We can’t wait to see what you do in the next 50 years!
