Dr Stuart Hesketh

Stuart teaches across a range of subjects across our Sports Medicine MSc programme and currently leads the MSc Performance Medicine programme. Stuart's research interests center on the use of proteomics to study muscle adaptation in the context of exercise training and how the role of circadian rhythms contribute to exercise adaptation and health. Stuart contributed to an indicative textbook in this area entitled "Exercise Metabolism" published by the American Physiological Society.

Dr Stuart Hesketh joined us in 2023 after previously working in both an applied setting with professional athletes and a research lab-based environment.

Stuart has over 6 years of experience working in an applied setting. He provided Sport Science support for a variety of professional athletes, including Team GB Paralympians, Team GB age category triathlon and the Welsh Women's Field Hockey team. Stuart has further worked in Strength and Conditioning coaching for Women's football and Super league teams: Widnes Vikings and Warrington Wolves for both the First team and academy players.

In 2016, Stuart was awarded a fully funded scholarship from the Research Institute of Sport and Exercise Sciences to complete his doctoral work. Here, programmed exercise was used to perturb skeletal muscle to study the mechanism of adaptation in vivo. To achieve this he utilised new dynamic proteome profiling methods that incorporate stable isotope/'heavy water' labelling and sophisticated peptide mass spectrometry analyses to measure the individual rates of protein synthesis, abundance change and degradation.

This work then led to a post-doctoral position. Here, Stuart spent several years at the University of Florida in the Department of Physiology and Functional Genomics, Myology Institute. During his time in America, Stuart's research focused on how circadian rhythms contribute to exercise adaptation, aging and health where he learnt and developed multi-disciplinary skills. He was involved with several stages of the MoTrPAC consortium. Upon Stuart's return to the UK in November 2021, he began work at the Centre for Proteome Research at the University of Liverpool. He provided high-quality analytical services to SRF clients, both internal and external to the university. His role also included leading the proteomic services for the NERC Environmental Omics Facility, managing a number of projects at any one time. This involved the processing of varied biological samples for proteomic analysis using Mass Spectrometry as well as bioinformatics support.