Photo by  Michael D. Spencer

Research

Max Performance

At the BU Wheelock PRO Lab, researchers are looking for the keys to excellence in athletics—and beyond

The 2026 Winter Olympics are more than a year away, but thousands of Olympic hopefuls are now making the decisions that will determine gold, silver, and bronze. As speed skaters build endurance, ice hockey goalies sharpen reflexes, and alpine skiers visualize the descent of Italy’s infamous Stelvio slope, they’re also trying to avoid the pitfalls that could derail their Olympic dreams, including injury, anxiety, and clashes with teammates and coaches.

“Athletes have unique stressors and challenges that are different from the everyday person: having to perform under pressure, having spectators watch and judge every moment,” says Carly Block, a lecturer in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Block is a member of the team at BU Wheelock’s Performance Recovery & Optimization (PRO) Lab, where faculty and students study the complexities of human performance—and how to maximize it.

Edson Filho, an associate professor of sport, exercise, and performance psychology, established the PRO Lab in 2020 with a vision of making BU Wheelock an international hub for sport psychology. “We need to be doing research at the highest level possible, meaning it has real-world implications and real-world impact,” Filho says. “And you really need a lab to move things forward.”

Filho set up the lab as both a consultancy—to work directly with athletes, coaches, and teams—and a research center. He, Block, and Anna Ward, a lecturer in sport, exercise, and performance psychology, along with PhD candidates Piotr Piasecki (’27) and Dhruv Raman (’21,’28), make up the lab’s staff. In addition to their own research, they mentor a growing group of student researchers—mostly graduate students, though Filho hopes to involve more undergraduates over time.  

The lab has brain-imaging and biofeedback technology. Ongoing projects on topics like mindfulness, body image, and peer leadership require data gathered from athletes. Block, whose research interest is the psychology of goalies, relies on one-on-one interviews and surveys to better understand soccer, ice hockey, field hockey, lacrosse, and water polo players tasked with keeping the ball or puck out of their own net. 

The community forming around the PRO Lab is as important as the infrastructure, Filho says. “The most important resource is human resources,” he says. And that takes the form of mentorship from faculty as well as frequent opportunities to share work and get feedback from peers. Filho sums up the lab’s model with a sports analogy: “You need good coaches, but if you’re playing with the best kids your age, they also raise your game.”

Beyond the Playing Field

Some of the lab’s biggest projects so far have been developing and testing intervention programs. With a 2022 NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant, Filho and doctoral students at the PRO Lab designed a program to help student-athletes build mental health skills over time. “Performance Recovery and Optimization for Wellness” includes eight workshops focused on themes like goal-setting, dealing with injury, preventing burnout, and practicing mindfulness. The BU team tested the program with 104 student-athletes from hockey, soccer, and swimming and found that it improved individual athletes’ well-being and had a positive impact on teams. They presented their results at the 2024 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) convention, and Filho expects the paper to be published soon. 

The impact of the lab’s work could reach well beyond athletics. The psychological community, slow to recognize the unique demands of athletics, has been expanding the field to embrace other high-pressure pursuits. The American Psychological Association, which was established in 1892, didn’t recognize sport and exercise psychology with its own division until 1986. “Performance” was added to the division in 2015 and covers other activities where perfection is often the goal, including music, dance, emergency response, and the military.

It’s the universality of seeking excellence that excites Filho. “A lot of youth won’t make it to the Olympics or to the soccer World Cup,” he says. “But if they learn how to set goals, about leadership and mindfulness—those skills have the potential to change lives for good.” Those lessons don’t just help an athletic team succeed; they can, as Filho suggests, improve a hospital or an entire healthcare system. 

“At some hospitals, surgeries have a very high percent success rate. And at some hospitals they don’t,” he says. When a mistake happens, “do you change the health system? Do you help the doctor? Sport and performance psychology addresses all of that and helps to transform people and systems. And BU needs to be at the forefront.” 

In 2024, PRO Lab hosted the BU Wheelock Forum, one of the school’s marquee annual events, and celebrated the growth of the field. The event convened academic, sports, music, law enforcement, and military leaders to explore topics related to individual and team performance. Oscar Gutierrez, a mental performance coordinator for the Boston Red Sox, Jennifer Bill, a lecturer in music who teaches saxophone at the BU College of Fine Arts, and Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of education and economics at BU Wheelock, spoke about improving teams and systems; Robert Lowe, BU’s police chief, Dennis Via (’88), a retired four-star general in the US Army, and Tanesha Beckford, a senior emergency medicine resident at Boston Medical Center, spoke about leadership in high-pressure situations. 

Through the forum, the NCAA grant, and the growing alumni base, Filho is already seeing BU Wheelock’s growth as a leader in sport and performance psychology. He recently hosted a postdoctoral scholar from Germany and is welcoming a visiting professor from Spain in fall 2024. He’s received research inquiries from Hungary, Italy, Japan, and Turkey as well.

Meanwhile, the Paris Olympics have come to a close and the international athletics calendar has turned over to the next Olympiad.  

“There’s such beauty in sport,” says Block. “It teaches so many transferable skills: how to find support, how to have teammates, how to be disciplined, how to be a leader. So much good comes out of it.”