ASP Member Spotlight

Melissa Muzeau

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Melissa Muzeau is a standout researcher, innovator, and the most recent recipient of the ASP Student Presentation Award in 2025. Her award-winning conference presentation, “From physiological workload to motivation: A mediation model involving affective valence and arousal during a 90-minute trail run”, provided a compelling snapshot of her work, combining physiology, emotion, and real-world performance to understand professional athletes.

Melissa’s path into sport science has been defined by bold decisions, curiosity, and a drive to rethink how we understand human performance. What began as a desire to help athletes break records evolved into a much broader mission – one that places the mind, not just the body, at the centre of performance science.

Early in her career, Melissa moved the United States to work in a sport science lab, an exceptionally bold move since, at the time, she did not speak English! She reflects on this experience as building “the confidence (or naivety)” that would then drive her to start her own company, providing physiological testing for athletes across France, including those competing at the Olympic level.

During this period Melissa began exploring cognitive testing in athletes, but found herself constrained by the limits of existing scientific tools and their real-world applicability. To solve this problem, she sought to bridge the gap between sport science and practice. This led Melissa to pursue her PhD with the Active Brain Team at the University of Canberra, working to connect both academia and industry in an effort to integrate psycho-cognitive testing into athlete profiling.

Melissa’s holistic, human focused approach to athlete profiling forms the core of her PhD research. “[Athletes are] more than a skeleton moving or a heart beating. They are human first, and performance strategies should take this into consideration, starting with the assessment of what’s happening in their mind.”

Alongside her doctoral work developing her ideas around profiling in athletes, Melissa has worked with the Australian Institute of Sport, contributing to both talent identification and performance testing, and has collaborated with the Sport Science team at On Running in Switzerland on footwear related projects, further strengthening her connection between research and industry.

Looking ahead, Melissa hopes to see psycho-cognitive metrics integrated into professional athlete assessment within the next five years. With strong ties to industry, she is also advocating for a broader shift in how performance is understood- moving from a culture of “harder, better, stronger” to one that is “smarter, better, happier,” with an emphasis on sustainability and wellbeing.

Melissa’s work embodies the spirit of ASP; innovative, interdisciplinary, and grounded in real-world impact. We look forward to seeing how her research continues to shape the future of psychophysiology in sport!

If you want to get in touch with Melissa or see more of her work you can connect with her via LinkedIn.