This workshop is designed for early career researchers (ECRs) and students interested in exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance research efficiency and creativity, while staying grounded in ethical and responsible use.

Join us for a dynamic 4-hour workshop designed for researchers, educators, and public health practitioners interested in participatory methods and systems thinking. This interactive session explores how systems mapping can be used to engage children and young people in understanding the complex factors that influence physical activity.

Grounded in child-centred research and participatory design, the workshop offers practical tools and creative ways to generate data for creating system maps with children – empowering them to share their lived experiences and contribute meaningfully to physical activity promotion.
Participants will engage in short presentations, hands-on activities, and small group discussions, including real-world case studies and role-play simulations. Highlights include designing system mapping sessions, exploring ethical considerations, and reflecting on how to embed children’s voices in systems research.

By the end of the workshop, attendees will:

• Understand the value of systems thinking in promoting physical activity.
• Gain practical knowledge of participatory mapping techniques.
• Build confidence in facilitating co-creative sessions with children.

Whether you’re working in research, education or community settings, this workshop will inspire new ways to collaborate with children and drive meaningful change.

Digital health technologies offer great promise for improving the reach and effectiveness of behavioral interventions for nutrition and physical activity; however, there exist persistent disparities in digital intervention access, engagement, and outcomes that can inadvertently widen existing health disparities. 

In this interactive pre-conference workshop, we will discuss pragmatic considerations in the design and evaluation of digital health interventions, with focus on the development of interventions that are inclusive, scalable, and grounded in real-world contexts. 

Participants will be given the opportunity to engage with experts and peers to discuss strategies related to intervention design, trial recruitment, trial retention, and outcomes analysis and reporting, with emphasis placed on actionable insights for current and future projects (e.g., selecting appropriate technologies, using user-centered design techniques, assessing and accounting for social inequality indicators). 

Overall, this workshop aims to provide tools, examples, and collaboration opportunities to researchers across the career spectrum to empower them to plan and conduct trials that lead to more equitable digital health interventions. Join us to share your experiences, learn from others, and help shape the future of digital health interventions for nutrition and physical activity. 

In an era of information overload, misinformation, and global health inequities, behavioral nutrition and physical activity professionals face an urgent challenge: how to make scientific evidence not only understood but trusted and actionable. Storytelling that bridges evidence and empathy offers a powerful bridge between data and human experience.

This interactive workshop, led by Dr. Monica Wang (Boston University School of Public Health; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), equips participants with practical narrative tools to communicate science with clarity, authenticity, and impact. Drawing from her book The Collective Cure and decades of public health research, participants will learn how to: identify the essential elements of an effective health story; tailor messages for audiences ranging from policymakers to families; and integrate storytelling into interventions, implementation research, and public communication.

Attendees will engage in guided writing and reflection exercises, small-group “story labs,” mini pitches, and peer feedback. They will leave with a draft narrative, a storytelling framework adaptable to behavioral research, and strategies for using narrative to foster trust, motivation, and sustainable behavior change across global contexts.

This workshop aims to share the learnings from the Policy Evaluation Network (PEN; https://www.jpi-pen.eu/), a four million, seven country, 28-research centre project in Europe, and the IMPAQT (www.ul.ie/research/impaqt) ERA4Health project, involving six European countries of diverse size, structure and political systems focused on policy and health equity.   Its purpose is to provide attendees with knowledge, skills and experience of how to conduct a physical activity (PA) policy implementation evaluation nationally, regionally or locally.

By the end of this workshop, attendees will:

• Enhance their knowledge on recent developments in PA policy globally.
• Understand a range of PA policy evaluation and monitoring tools and analyse their usefulness.
• Gain first-hand experience in using a PA policy monitoring tool, the PA-Environment Policy Index.  This tool is designed to assess the extent of implementation of national government policies and actions to promote PA.
• Undertake a comparison to international best practice, learn how to identify and prioritise critical implementation gaps and create feasible recommendations.
• Reflect on workshop learnings to inform and stimulate future research and practice in this field. 

Social network analysis (SNA) is a theoretical framework and set of methodologies growing in popularity, specifically in health behavior settings. Simply put, SNA gives researchers and practitioners a way to analyze connections within systems. Further, SNA helps answer unique research questions relating to health behaviors and outcomes among individuals, organizations, and communities. For example, SNA could be used to analyze the impact of collaborative ties between organizations in a health coalition; how friendship ties between adolescents at a summer care program impact physical activity; or network properties related to program adoption.

This workshop serves as an introduction to and overview of the theory and application of SNA in physical activity and nutrition research and practice. We will cover theoretical premise and conceptualization of network data to provide a broad overview of what is possible when applying SNA in research. Successful participants will be able to develop a basic level of understanding of networks and SNA. This conceptualization of connections and networks is key for further application of methodology. No prior knowledge of SNA or data analysis is required.

This interactive workshop addresses inequities in physical activity and nutrition research caused by expensive proprietary digital tools. 

The session introduces techquity—extending digital equity to emphasize technological autonomy—enabling community-based researchers to independently collect and analyze behavioral data without dependence on commercial platforms.

Participants will learn to use CloneApp, a progressive web application platform, to create customized mobile research tools for physical activity tracking, dietary assessment, and intervention monitoring. The device-agnostic platform works across all operating systems and browsers, supporting both quantitative (i.e., step counts, food logs) and qualitative data capture (i.e., dietary narratives, activity barriers) without requiring programming expertise or app store deployment.

The workshop format includes pre-conference instructional materials, followed by context-setting presentations on a techquity framework, guided demonstrations of CloneApp’s capabilities, and extensive hands-on design sprints where participants create their own research applications. Peer review sessions will enable collaborative learning and troubleshooting, while participant presentations will showcase innovative solutions.

Learning objectives focus on enhancing digital literacy for ethical public health surveillance, building capacity to design and deploy frugal technology tools, and exploring implementation strategies that minimize reliance on big technology companies while maintaining data sovereignty for culturally-responsive community interventions.

This workshop will dive deeply into emerging global research in youth fitness surveillance, assessment, and intervention. We will identify areas where fitness assessment can complement efforts in physical activity surveillance and monitoring. In turn, we will highlight temporal trends in fitness compared to trends in physical activity. We will also explore emerging global consensus on fitness assessment, strategies to implement school-based assessments, and the importance of fitness outcomes in physical activity interventions.

Rational

Globally, physical activity assessment dominates youth monitoring and surveillance, despite challenges associated with self-report and device-based measures. In contrast,  fitness assessment is simple, cost-effective, scalable, and provides an objective measure of underlying health and overall physical activity levels. Fitness assessment could be used to promote and educate youth about the importance of physical activity for health. Innovative approaches to increase population physical activity levels are needed and fitness assessment and monitoring may be a key missing piece.

Objectives

• Present recent developments in international fitness surveillance and monitoring.
• Explore the trends in fitness and how fitness relates to underlying health outcomes.
• Discuss the challenges of school-based fitness assessments.
• Explore why fitness is an important outcome to assess in school-based physical activity interventions.

Sustaining Wellbeing through Mentorship and Intergenerational Knowledge Exchange is a one-day, Indigenous-led workshop held alongside ISBNPA 2026 in Cádiz. Grounded in Indigenous concepts of wellbeing (e.g., Whānau Ora, Buen Vivir, Kaswentha Two Row Wampum), it will bring together Elders / Knowledge Keepers, Indigenous trainees, and allied researchers from Turtle Island (North America), Abya Yala (South America) and Aotearoa (New Zealand).

The workshop will: 

• Create a safe, respectful, and shared space for participants to reflect on how land, language, food systems, movement and intergenerational relationships shape health;
• Highlight Indigenous community-driven approaches to behavioural nutrition and physical activity;
• Co-identify research and mentorship priorities for future collaborations.

Using talking circles, small-group dialogues and short “igniter” presentations, participants will share concrete examples of culturally grounded health promotion, including youth-led initiatives, community food sovereignty projects and land-based physical activity programs. With participants’ consent, a short participatory audiovisual segment will be recorded to support later knowledge mobilization.

The workshop is co-organized by the Indigenizing Wellbeing Research Circle (ISBNPA SIG) and partners from Indigenous communities in Canada, Colombia, Peru and Aotearoa, and aims to seed a lasting international network on Indigenous wellbeing research. 

Implementation efforts often fail when moving from the efficacy and effectiveness phase into the real-world implementation and scale up phase. This is due to the changes made by implementers to align effective interventions with context. It is well recognized that successful implementation often requires adapting interventions to diverse settings without compromising their effectiveness. 

This interactive workshop will equip participants with practical tools to identify and define the core components of their interventions—those essential elements that must remain intact during adaptation and scale-up. We begin with a brief overview of key concepts from adaptation and implementation science. What information is needed to identify these core components? How are the core components linked together (e.g., theory of change, logic models, ABCDs). How can you document core components and adaptation of your interventions systematically? Participants will explore real-world examples such as SuperFIT, Healthy Primary School of the Future, and the SWAP IT Healthy School Lunchbox programme to see these principles in action. 

The workshop is hands-on: in small subgroups, participants will apply the introduced concepts to their own intervention. Questions that will be addressed are for example: Which components are non-negotiable? Which adaptations are necessary and feasible? How can you document adaptation systematically? 

Intensive longitudinal data (ILD) are becoming increasingly central to behavioral nutrition and physical activity research, as advances in smartphones and wearable sensors now enable high-density, real-time assessment of behaviors, contexts, and psychological states. These data offer unprecedented opportunities to characterize how individuals fluctuate across micro-timescales (second, minutes, hours, days)—capturing not only their average behavioral levels (e.g., usual daily physical activity), but also the variability (e.g., day-to-day fluctuations in dietary intake) and dynamic associations among constructs (e.g., whether momentary feelings of energy levels predict physical activity within persons).

This workshop introduces state-of-the-science statistical approaches using open source MixWILD software for modeling intraindividual means, variances, and slopes derived from ILD, and demonstrates how these estimated random effects can be leveraged to advance behavioral research. For example, we examine whether day-to-day variability in physical activity intentions predicts physical activity trajectories and patterns across a year among young adults.

Participants will gain a conceptual foundation in these novel analytical methods, view illustrative research applications, and engage in hands-on demonstrations of the statistical models and software in practice. The workshop will also provide practical, implementation-focused guidance for integrating the method into their own ILD workflows. Our overarching aim is helping behavioral researchers understand and apply methodologically rigorous tools that allow researchers to investigate dynamic behavioral processes underlying physical activity and behavioral nutrition with greater precision.

This interactive, field-based workshop will train participants to use environmental audit and behavioral observation tools to evaluate how public spaces shape behavioral outcomes across diverse contexts. Cádiz, Spain, with its walkable streets, coastal promenades, historic districts, and nearby residential areas, offers an ideal setting for hands-on learning.

Participants will be introduced to five validated environmental audit and behavioural tools. To demonstrate how tools capture different aspects of the same setting, participants will rotate in small groups through field sites. At each location, two groups will apply different tools in a “comparison challenge,” sharing how each method reveals the  environment’s unique story. Facilitators will accompany each site to support consistent training. The session brings together PA and nutrition researchers, prompting nutrition researchers to explore how PA tools can be adapted to assess nutrition behaviours and environments. This both demonstrates the tools’ interdisciplinary adaptability and harnesses the strength of the ISNBPA network. Depending on group size, participants will visit two to four locations.

The workshop concludes with a discussion on emerging technological approaches, international tool applications for research and policy, and strategies for community-engagement. The session will serve as networking opportunity, spark collaborations and cross-disciplinary insights for using standardized audit and observation tools.

We’re excited to announce a pre-conference workshop on Culinary Medicine to support women with Endometriosis – an innovative, hands-on experience that bridges science and practice.

Endometriosis affects millions worldwide, and nutrition plays a key role in managing symptoms and improving quality of life. This 3-hour interactive workshop will introduce evidence-based nutrition strategies and empower participants to translate them into antioxidant, antiproliferative, and anti-inflammatory meals.

The session combines theory with hands-on practice: we begin by introducing the pillars of Culinary Medicine, then move into the kitchen for a cooking experience using fresh local and regional ingredients. Participants will prepare raw and/or cooked dishes, explore mindful eating techniques, and take-home practical strategies they can apply to support long-term, sustainable dietary changes.

Limited to 20 attendees for maximum engagement – don’t miss this opportunity to connect, learn, and taste science!