The Institute for the Psychology of Elite Performance

We are a group of 12 academics, 15 doctoral researchers, and we are the research team who have a real core interest in the psychology of performance.

My name's Andy Cook. I'm director of our research institute for the psychology of elite performance. IPEP was originally established in 2000, and we're really proud that the cutting edge research that we've delivered has had real impact across the world. IPEP theories, IPEP papers, on topics like mental toughness, stress and performance, confidence and performance. They're key references that are taught now on curriculums in sports science departments, in psychology departments across the world.

We conduct research in a wide variety of areas that are relevant to the psychology of high performance. We conduct world leading research in topics spanning personality, stress and performance, risk taking, resilience, right through to talent development and identification, mental wellbeing increasingly, and also the psychophysiology and neuroscientific mechanisms that underpin how people react to pressure, how people perform when it matters most.

The sports psychology provision, if that's modules on undergraduate programs, if that's our distance learning, programming performance psychology, those courses, those modules are delivered by the staff who are researchers, who are institute for the psychology of elite performance.

We're really proud that our research is consistently ranked among the leading departments in the UK and globally for the calibre of our research. In the most recent UK government research excellence framework, 100% of our research was rated as world leading or internationally excellent. We've had over a hundred doctoral researchers that have graduated through our institute. And we're really pleased that those individuals now are placed in high profile organisations, either as practitioners or as actually researchers. A lot of them are based in universities, some of them here with us, some of them in other universities across the world.

The people that have progressed through our institute now have really successful careers. And increasingly now we're transitioning into some other spaces around mental health and wellbeing, potentially a really impactful therapy that can benefit more than just elite performers in sport, but that can benefit people in general. And that's really, really exciting.