Centre of Expertise Urban Vitality
Raôul Oudejans is a movement scientist and has been working at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam since 1991, as a senior lecturer since 2011. In 1996, he received his PhD with the thesis The Optics and Actions of Catching Fly Balls on the visual control of catching high fly balls in baseball. He is also a special professor of Sports and Performance Psychology at the Hogeschool of Amsterdam, in the Faculty of Physical Activity, Sports and Nutrition. The lectureship falls under the cooperation between the VUA and HvA under the banner of the Amsterdam Institute of Sport Science.
Raôul has always been fascinated by the enormous movement skills with which we interact in and with our environment, and the infinite possibilities we have to become better at this, such as in sports, music and dance. He therefore conducts research into perception and movement in sport and other performance domains with an emphasis on the influence of psychological factors on performance and learning. In recent years, his research has specialised in sport and performance psychology in general and in the visual control of the basketball shot (and other sport skills) and training and performance under pressure in sport, the performing arts and the police in particular.
He has more than 115 international scientific publications to his name, as well as eight book chapters and four books, including the study book Sport Psychology (Bakker & Oudejans, 2012, 2019, Nieuwegein: Arko Sports Media), he is on the editorial board of two international scientific journals and gives more than 10 invited presentations per year to various audiences. Furthermore, he has supervised 11 successful PhD students as a co-supervisor in the past 12 years. Since 2018, he has been in possession of the right to promote (ius promovendi) so that he can also act as a supervisor. Currently he supervises three PhD students as supervisor and one as co-supervisor. In the last three years, he has secured more than a million euros in research grants. The RAAK public research project Training for Excellence received the third prize for Research of the Year at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in 2021.