University of Waikato Olympic Weightlifting expert and doctoral student Monica Nelson has achieved a remarkable milestone by becoming the first to win a prestigious international research award twice.
Monica’s doctoral research explores the beliefs of female Olympic Weightlifters and their coaches about how men and women should be trained, whether similarly or differently, and how these beliefs influence training practices, dietary protocols, and the use of equipment within the sport.
She has been awarded the Barbara Brown Outstanding PhD Student Paper Award from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS), continuing the University of Waikato’s history of success with the award being the only institution outside of North America to have won it.
The award is named after Dr Barbara A. Brown, who was a professor of sport sociology at the University of Western Ontario from 1983 until her passing in 1990 at the age of 40.
University of Waikato PhD student Monica Nelson
Dr Brown was widely respected for her groundbreaking work on women in sport and leisure, her dedication to expanding opportunities for girls and women in sport, and her leadership in building a strong professional community of sport sociologists.
“The paper I won the award for looks at how three conflicting ideas about sex, gender, and strength shape training in two Olympic Weightlifting gyms here in Aotearoa,” says Monica.
“The first idea is that women’s bodies are equal to men’s – we all have the same muscles, bones, and ligaments, and we all train with the same equipment. Strength is built through the same fundamentals.
“The second idea is that women’s bodies are different – training can vary around the menstrual cycle, and women use lighter barbells that move differently, which affects performance.
“And the third idea is that women are actually better suited to Olympic Weightlifting than men. In New Zealand, the sport has really become a women’s domain. Women lifters often train more, compete more internationally, and that’s changing what their strength levels look like.”
It is the first time anyone has won the award for both their master’s and PhD papers.
Monica first won the award in 2021 while doing her master’s at the University of Maryland.
Born and raised near Seattle, Monica specifically chose to do her PhD at the University of Waikato because of her supervisors, Professor Holly Thorpe, Professor Belinda Wheaton, Dr Stacy Sims and Dr Gloria Clarke.
“They’ve done some really fascinating work, truly transdisciplinary research. Holly is a feminist sociologist, and Stacy is an exercise scientist, and together they combine methods from both fields to closely examine athletes’ experiences of low energy availability, exploring its causes, the culture of the sport, and the physiological effects.
“I wanted to do research that was as close to that as possible. It’s incredibly rare, if not impossible, to find anyone else doing this kind of work, which is exactly why I wanted to collaborate with them.”
Professor Thorpe also won the Barbara A. Brown Award in 2005 and has since had three PhD students receive it: Nida Ahmad (2017), Julie Brice (2020), and now Monica.
Monica Nelson won Barbara Brown Outstanding PhD Student Paper Award from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport
“This is an internationally very competitive award, and it is a wonderful acknowledgement of the quality of Monica’s PhD research examining the complexities of sex/gender-based knowledge circulating in women’s sport. Women’s sport is in a ‘boom time’ with more investment, public interest and research than ever before, and Monica’s PhD does a great job of identifying the different pressures, expectations, and competing knowledge that contemporary sportswomen are navigating” says Professor Thorpe.
“The Barbara Brown Outstanding PhD Student Paper Award has been running since 1981. Since then, no other university outside North America has won one of these, but this is the fourth time a Waikato PhD student has received the award.
“So, this is a moment to celebrate Monica’s wonderful research, and also a legacy of internationally recognised, high-quality research on women’s sport coming out of the University of Waikato,” says Professor Thorpe.
Earlier this year, Monica also won a highly competitive International Olympic Committee PhD Students and Early Career Academics Research Grant Programme focused on international Olympic Weightlifting coaches knowledge and practices training women athletes. For this research she interviewed coaches and sports leaders from Aotearoa New Zealand, Botswana, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, the Philippines, and the United States.
Since 1999, the Olympic Studies Centre has supported Olympic-related academic research through two key initiatives, one of which is the PhD Students and Early Career Academics Grant Programme.
35 candidates from 20 countries and five continents applied for the grant.
Monica is in the final few months of her PhD and plans to continue coaching and researching the sport she loves.
