Phd as part of an interdisciplinary project investigating how social identity processes influence biomechanical loading and the dynamic performance of urban structures.

RUN2GETHER is an interdisciplinary research project that aims to use running training groups and events as living laboratories where human movement, social identity, technology, and urban infrastructure dynamically interact.

Project

RUN2GETHER explores how collective running, one of the world’s most popular physical activities, can help build healthier citizens and more sustainable cities. Bringing together insights from biomechanics, from social and sport psychology, and from structural engineering stimulated by recent developments in machine learning, the project investigates how runners’ shared social identity can influence their movement synchrony, physical load, and interaction with the running infrastructures. Using cutting-edge computer vision, wearable sensors, and citizen science, RUN2GETHER will capture large-scale, real-world data during running events and group runs. These data will advance our understanding of how human collectives move together and how this can affect the performance and resilience of both individuals and of urban infrastructures such as bridges and running tracks. By engaging citizens as active contributors to science and running surface health monitoring, the project aims to transform running events into living laboratories for innovation in health, social cohesion, and sustainable city design.

There will be three PhD closely working together in this research project. This main topic of this specific PhD will be to identify social identity processes that influence synchrony and individual biomechanical load during group running and to determine how citizen science approaches can support running surface health monitoring while simultaneously enhancing their social identification with the (running) community. 

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