Representatives from all partner organisations of Football on the Brain, including the Podium Institute, convened at the University of Oxford to mark the halfway point of the project on 23rd April. Football on the Brain is a dynamic four-year public engagement project involving researchers and football communities to delve deeper into how our brains are involved in football.

The event featured project updates, pitch practicals, MRI scanner demos and discussion groups on future plans for the project and its legacy.

Sport related concussion, including those incurred playing football, is one of the Podium Institute’s research areas of interest, focusing on understanding the short- and long-term effects of head impacts occurring either between ball and player, or amongst players. In addition Podium researchers are working on developing an improved understanding of the biomechanical causes and potential prevention of knee injuries. Ongoing multi-modal studies are enabling functional MRI scanning of teenage and adult athletes shortly after head impacts, in order to understand and characterize their functional as well as structural implications. Computer vision techniques and wearable sensors are also being utilised to inform advanced modelling of brain and knee biomechanics. Read more