John Bartholomew

John Bartholomew, Ph.D., is Professor and Head of the Department of Kinesiology at Penn State University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Harvard University, where he was a member of the varsity football team. He holds a Ph.D. in exercise science, with an emphasis in sport and exercise psychology, from Arizona State University. He spent 28 years at The University of Texas at Austin and is in his third year at Penn State. He is a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine and an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Kinesiology. He is a past Editor-in-Chief of the Translational Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine and President-elect of the American Kinesiology Association. His research centers on increasing physical activity in school settings. He has received funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Texas Department of State Health Services. He has ongoing collaborations in the UK and Norway, where he works to support elementary teachers in integrating physical activity into their classrooms.

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Dan Lieberman

Dr. Daniel Lieberman is the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Science and the founding chair of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He received his A.B. from Harvard University in 1986 ( summa cum laude ), M.Phil. from Cambridge University in 1987, and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1993. By combining experimental biomechanics and physiology, paleontology, and comparative anatomy, he focuses his research on the evolution of the human body and its relevance to health and disease. He is best known for his research on the evolution of running and walking, but he also studies diet and metabolism. He teaches courses on human evolution, anatomy, and physiology and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and four books: Fed Up: A Hungry Person’s Guide to the Story and Science of Food and Diets (Knopf, 2026), Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding (Pantheon, 2021), The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease (Pantheon, 2013), and The Evolution of the Human Head (Harvard University Press, 2011). He is also an avid runner.

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Hailey Otis

Dr. Hailey Nicole Otis is an award-winning scholar and educator committed to body justice and intersectional liberation. Dr. Otis serves as an assistant professor of rhetoric in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she also co-directs the Oral Communication Program. Across her scholarly and activist pursuits, Dr. Otis embraces communication and rhetoric as tools of and toward worldmaking—the process through which rhetors (especially activists and agents of social justice) envision and bring into being spaces where non-normative bodies and identities are celebrated and liberated rather than stigmatized or marginalized. She has spoken and published on topics including intersectional fat activism, body-positive rhetoric online and in popular culture, disability justice and abolitionism, as well as medical fatphobia and healthism. The power of Dr. Otis’ research lies in its ability to amplify the voices of those with multiply marginalized bodies who engage in the labor of worldmaking, while also leveraging scholarship as a tool of worldmaking in and of itself. To that end, she is currently writing a multiple-grant-funded book project that weaves rhetorical analysis with oral history, archival research, and embodied narrative methods to investigate the evolving relational and worldmaking possibilities of the online body-positivity movement. She is also building a community-engaged, public-facing digital archive of the body positivity movement. The archive will include an exhibit of oral history interviews, “Body Positivity’s Beginnings: Commemorating the Voices of Early Movement Builders,” and an interactive community timeline documenting the movement’s origins, history, and evolution.

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Deborah Salvo

Dr. Salvo works at the intersection of physical activity and spatial epidemiology, with a profound commitment to documenting, understanding, and resolving disparities in access to health-promoting and environmentally sustainable urban environments for all. In her role as associate professor of kinesiology and health education at The University of Texas at Austin, she established and leads the People, Health and Place Lab. She specializes in conducting studies assessing and leveraging the role of place (physical, social, and policy context) in physical activity and other health-related behaviors, with the goal of promoting physical activity and health equity. Dr. Salvo has a special interest in Latino/Latin American populations, both in the United States and across Latin America. She leads an active research portfolio that includes two current R01-level (five-year, $3 million+ USD) NIH-funded collaborative projects: the Active Middle School Communities (AMSC) project in Austin, Texas, and the Comunidades y Espacios Activos (CEA) project in Mexico. Dr. Salvo’s work also strongly focuses on building research capacity for physical activity and public health in low- and middle-income countries. She founded the Latin American Society of Physical Activity and Health Research (SLIAFS), co-founded and co-directed the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities, and serves as president of the International Society of Physical Activity and Health (ISPAH) for the 2026–2028 term.

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Jamie Shultz

Jaime Schultz is a Professor of Kinesiology at Pennsylvania State University with
an affiliate faculty appointment in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. An award-winning teacher and scholar, she has published seven books, including Regulating Bodies: Elite Sport Policies and Their Unintended Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2024). Schultz currently serves as co-editor of the “Sport and Society” series at the University of Illinois Press.