IU announces initiative studying health, performance of female athletes

Indiana University is teaming with the Indiana Sports Corp. and Pacers Sports & Entertainment for what it calls a first-of-its-kind research program dedicated to the health, performance and lifelong well-being of female athletes.

“There’s just so much energy in women’s sports, especially here in Indiana, and then in IU, we have a lot of great sports performance work. We have a great medical school. We have really strong data science and informatics,” Katie Siek, an informatics professor who is co-chairing the initiative’s research committee, told Inside INdiana Business. “With all of these systems, it’s just the opportune time for us to kind of capitalize on all of those strengths and bring it together for a really important area that’s under-studied.”

The Female Sports Performance and Research Initiative, announced Tuesday, aims to broaden the focus on female athletes in performance and health research, providing women-centered data for decision-makers who often have to rely on male-dominated data sets to develop policies and protocols.

The initiative is developed in partnership with the IU Launch Accelerator for Biosciences, or IU LAB.

The goal is to generate data to support evidence-based guidelines for training, injury prevention, recovery and overall health promotion.

“I am a first generation college student, and I got through college playing basketball for a Division II (school) and you know, throughout my entire life, there’s just been these injuries. And when I talk to my doctors and such (they say) ‘we just don’t know … we don’t have enough data,’” Siek said. “With IU LAB, it provides that really easy interface between academia and industry.”

The Indiana Sports Corp. unveiled its Vision 2050 last September with the goal of “building a landscape that can establish and maintain Indianapolis as a world capital for teams, events and organizations.” The efforts focus on five pillars of growth, one of which is women’s sports.

“Indiana is ready to lead a national movement to reimagine the female athletic experience,” Patrick Talty, the president of Indiana Sports Corp., said in a written statement. “This effort is deeply rooted in our city’s commitment to sports innovation and community impact, and it aligns with our economic strategy to lead the future of sports.”

Siek says IU is also looking for partners and hopes to collaborate with several industry groups.

“With this current funding environment, we’re also looking at how we can redefine how we fund research so it could be more about making partnerships,” she said. “We envision this future where, when we have this cohort, that someone can come in and say, ‘I have this product,’ and we would have a group of people ready to use that product. There’s so much opportunity.”