Research

Insight & Innovation

Our 2021-2025 Strategic Plan sets out our objective to “Enhance our insight about the constantly evolving threats to clean sport in the UK and globally”.

UKAD has launched an Insight & Innovation team to co-ordinate our engagement with research and identify ways of enhancing our operations.

Contact the Team

Our Insight & Innovation team can be contacted via email at insight@ukad.org.uk.

Objective 2

Our Objectives

Research
Co-ordinate the development of our Research and Innovation Agenda
Partners
Seek out opportunities to embed technology or approaches from other sectors to enhance our operations
World
Improve engagement with UK and International Research Institutions
Stats
Commission research studies, pilot projects and support research proposals submitted to funding bodies

Our Research & Innovation Agenda

Prevalence
Prevalence

  • We will research doping prevalence within sports in the UK

  • We seek new methods and technologies to gain insight on doping prevalence within sports

 

Drug Detection
Drug Detection

  • Implementation of novel sample collection methods

  • Improve UKAD's detection rates for prohibited substances and methods through enhanced analyses

Monitor and evaluation
Monitoring & Evaluation

  • We will use data obtained from monitoring and evaluation processes to improve UKAD's anti-doping education and operations

Data analytics
Data Analytics

  • We will research how we can use our existing data and external data to inform UKAD's policies

Priorities
Research Priorities

UKAD's Insight & Innovation team have identified the following four areas as our research priorities. 

Read about them below.

Prevalence

Prevalence studies are difficult to undertake due to the inherent difficulties of obtaining accurate and reliable data.

We will seek innovative ways of assessing prevalence of doping in sports in the UK, by sport and by level of athlete.

This will enable us to benchmark our efforts in the pursuit of clean sport.

blood vial
Drug Detection

To enhance our drug detection for prohibited substances and methods we will carry out more research in the following areas:

Dried Blood Sampling

  • Detecting anabolic androgenic steroids from dried blood sampling 
  • Detecting steroid esters from dried blood sampling 
  • Expanding on the analysis menu in order to validate detection methods towards other prohibited substances and methods 

Blood Doping

  • Detecting autologous blood transfusion 
  • Developing indirect methods for detecting blood doping

Improving existing analytical methods

  • Growth hormone biomarkers
  • Growth hormone releasing factors 
  • Erythropoiesis-stimulating agents
Monitor
Monitoring & Evaluation

To enhance our anti-doping education and operations at UKAD we seek to answer the following research questions:

Education

  • How can we measure the effectiveness of our education interventions? 
  • How effective are our education programmes towards reducing unintentional and/or intentional doping? 
  • What are the most effective methods for educating athlete support personnel?  

Testing

  • How effective is our testing strategy at deterring athletes from doping?

Results Management

  • Can we measure the impact of our sample storage and reanalysis programme on deterring athletes from doping? 

Intelligence & Investigations

  • Are there alternative methods towards gathering information on suspected doping activity?
Data Analytics

Using data to inform our policies and processes, we seek to answer:

  • What can our existing data can tell us?
  • Does Artificial Intelligence have a role in supporting anti-doping activities?

 

Current Research Projects

Improving whistleblowing on doping in sport through behavioural design

Background: 

UKAD are committed to deliver a safe, secure and confidential whistleblowing service, which provides information and support to athletes, and other professionals within sport, to come forward and report their suspicions of doping. We are collaborating with the behavioural change consultancy, Desire Code, to help us identify the barriers faced by athletes (and other individuals in professional sport) and co-create solutions based on behavioural design to encourage people to come forward with information.

 

The project aims to: 

  • Conduct interviews with athletes and athlete support personnel to explore their knowledge, beliefs and experiences of the barriers to reporting doping practices within professional sport
  • Design behavioural change interventions that target those barriers
  • Implement the interventions within UKADs Protect Your Sport campaign and whistleblowing platforms
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions by comparing baseline data with data collected 6 months post-implementation

  

Objective: 

By listening to athletes, and other sports professionals, we will identify and understand the key barriers towards whistleblowing. We will utilise behavioural science and design to co-create solutions to encourage people to come forward, with confidence, with information on doping practices.

See more

Clean Sport content within Higher Education courses in the UK 

The project aims to: 

Understand the current extent of clean sport curriculum content across UK Higher Education (HE) courses. Specifically, we are seeking to assess:  

  • the breadth and context of clean sport topics within courses   

  • how clean sport topics are delivered and assessed  

  • how relevant any prior clean sport education was towards current employment/voluntary role   

The project includes: 

An online survey to gather these insights from academic staff, current students, alumni and professionals within the UK sport sector.  

Objective 

UKAD intends to use the findings from this study to assist HE Institutes deliver a comprehensive clean sport education offering for their students and academic staff by developing tailored clean sport content and resources that can become embedded within HE courses.  

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UK Trial of WADA’s Doping Prevalence Survey Tool (DPST)

Background: 

The WADA Prevalence Working Group has developed a Doping Prevalence Survey Tool (DPST), which uses the crosswise method designed to ensure anonymity and confidentiality and reduce the extent that participants answer sensitive questions in a socially desirable manner rather than providing honest responses.  

The project aims to: 

  • Support the assessment of WADA’s DPST through conducting a validation trial  

    • UKAD, with support from NGBs and other stakeholders, will disseminate this anonymous survey to elite athletes in the UK 

  • Contribute to refining and validating the DPST before formal global implementation can be considered 

  • Establish an estimate of doping prevalence amongst elite athletes within the UK 

Objective

Collaborate with WADA on the validation of a reliable and evidence-based method for estimating the prevalence of doping. Establishing a reliable estimate of doping prevalence in the UK shall enable us to benchmark our efforts and the impact of our initiatives in the pursuit of clean sport.  

See more
Expressions of Interest

Our research priorities are intended to stimulate interest and offer the opportunity for academic researchers and other stakeholder partners to submit expressions of interest towards research projects.

Interested parties are invited to submit a project proposal that addresses any of the identified research priorities. Please download the application template to ensure sufficient details are provided.

Email us

Call for Proposals

UKAD may occasionally initiate specific research projects through Calls for Proposals (CfP) on this page. We will publish a CfP document, inviting researchers or other stakeholder partners to submit proposals to address a specific need.

Each call document will include a summary of the purpose of the project, the outputs required and details of the timeframe and available budget. Applicants are advised to review both the call document and application template for guidance. An application deadline will be defined in the CfP document.

Seeking Partners

The Insight & Innovation team welcome innovative approaches from other organisations, particularly from other sectors, offering novel methods towards tackling our challenges.

Do you see an opportunity to collaborate on an innovative project that can help UKAD protect clean sport?
Can your organisation offer a unique approach to answering our problems?
Have you identified an area of our operations that your organisation can help us improve?

If so, we want to hear from you.
Email us
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