Professor Tim Olds
Professor in the School of Health Sciences, Physical Education, Exercise And Sport Studies
Professor Tim Olds has been investigating fitness, fatness, physical activity and food intake in children in Australia and around the world. He has accumulated databases on over 50,000,000 children from 50 countries, and has analysed historical trends over the last 100 years. His work has been the first to map historical changes in the body size and shape of children and athletes, to definitively show that children’s fitness has been declining globally since the early 1970s, and that the sleep duration of Australian children has been declining for 20 years.
Professor Olds developed the Multimedia Activity Recall for Children and Adults (MARCA), a computerised 24 h use-of-time recall which has now been administered to more than 30,000 young people in Australia, New Zealand and Korea. The MARCA is currently being used in a number of state and national surveys, including the Raine Study (WA), Health of Young Victorians Study (Victoria), and the $4 million Kids Eat Kids Play (national) survey, on which Professor Olds is Project Director.
Data from the MARCA provide an extremely high-resolution snapshot of how children and adults spend their time, and allow associations to be made between and among socio-demographic, psychographic, health, and use-of-time characteristics. Professor Olds is also one of 12 anthropometrists in the world accredited by the International Society for the Advancement of Kinanthropometry at Level 4. He is Project Director of the $4 million Defence-funded ADAPT Project which is using 3D laser scanning to characterise the body size and shape of pilots.