Hi, my name is Peter Lamb. I’m a lecturer at the School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences. I teach performance analysis and sports biomechanics, and I’m the programme leader of Sports Technology.

Sports Technology is a rapidly changing discipline that basically involves measuring and analysing human performance. A few careers that students go into after taking Sports Technology are performance analysis, where you’d be looking at analysing game stats either from video or from specialised sensors; technique analysis, which is the study of individual skills using mainly biomechanical analysis.

Students often go into research and development, so they do product testing, looking at things like shoe technology or different sports equipment. Some students go into research. We had a student last year who just finished up — he was working with Snow Sport New Zealand, studying the workload and performance of elite snowboard athletes in slopestyle snowboarding.

If you decide to enrol in Sports Technology, your first year would involve studying a core group of papers looking at human physiology, anatomy, and sports science. Later on in the programme, you have a choice of choosing between a couple of different pathways. One pathway would be design, which would consist mostly of computer science papers. Another pathway is analysis, where you would be taking statistics and data analysis, data science papers.

It’ll be helpful if you have a strong mathematics and science background from Year 13 in school. If you decide to come to Otago to study Sports Technology, we have an excellent staff. We look forward to working with you and teaching about exercise physiology, biomechanics, and motor control.

We’re the top-ranked university in New Zealand for sports-related topics, and we’re currently ranked 12th in the world. If you’re interested in Sports Technology, we look forward to hearing from you.