Birthplace effects in the development of expertise – Dany MacDonald

In the first year of my master’s (which was in 2003) I became involved in a project that my advisor (Dr. Jean Côté) was working on. It investigated the effects of city size on the probability of becoming an elite athlete. Interesting findings began to emerge and we discovered that smaller cities were in fact more favorable to elite athlete development. More recently, Jared King, an undergrad student became interested in this topic and joined our research team. With the help of Dr. Côté and a researcher in Hong Kong, Dr. Bruce Abernethy, we wrote a follow-up of paper investigating this effect in groups of female athletes. It finally made it to print in the beginning of this calendar year and has begun receiving media attention. It was selected as a promotional article to “sell” the journal in which it was published and a media release is being sent to multiple sources. Although unexpected, this is a nice perk that has come from this research…

For an article related to this topic, click here…
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/03/05/2506315.htm?site=science&topic=latest