Karen Howells

Karen Howells is a Chartered Sport Psychologist and a Sport and Fitness Lecturer at The Open University. She is passionate about both sport and teaching and learning, so enjoys being in a job that brings these two passions together.

Her sporting passion is swimming – she is a Masters Swimmer, a Level 2 UKCC swimming coach and a Sport Psychologist working predominantly with swimmers (although she has worked with a variety of athletes from many different sports, from gymnastics to golf, trampolining to triathlon, hockey to lacrosse and so on…).

Karen’s PhD at Loughborough University and her current research interests are concerned with elite sport and mental health, and elite sport and adversarial growth – that is, with analysing when things go wrong and the nature of the positives that can be taken from the traumatic and adverse experiences. She is the current chair of E314 Exploring contemporary issues in sport and exercise and in October 2017 she will be chairing E233 Sport and exercise psychology.

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