David Conroy

Fun day at work today as @umkines.bsky.social unveiled a new art installation, Movement to Momentum, created by Schinkel Fine Art with collaboration from our school community. Light reflects playfully off the metal to highlight the activities and sports that give us health & inspiration

Pre-Conference Courses | Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM) Pre-Conference Courses

🔗 Full details and registration: www.sbm.org/events/annua...

#SBM2026 #BehavioralMedicine #NatureRX #PublicHealth #ClimateResilience

📅 Wednesday, April 22
🕚 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
📍 SBM Annual Meeting

The session will explore the evidence behind "NatureRX" and how nature-based interventions can be used to promote physical activity while building community resilience against climate change. It looks like a must-attend for anyone at the intersection of public health and environmental science.

Looking for innovative ways to address physical activity and climate change? 🌿🚑

The Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM) is hosting a timely pre-conference course: “Nature as Medicine: Evidence-Based NatureRX for Physical Activity Promotion and Climate Resilience.”

Registration is OPEN- join me in learning how we can push the state of the science forward!

www.interventionoptimization.org/conference/hub

The conference is co-hosted by the Center for Advancement and Dissemination of Intervention Optimization (CADIO) at NYU and the Data Science for Dynamic Intervention Decision Making Center (@d3center.bsky.social) at University of Michigan. www.interventionoptimization.org

One of the meetings I am most excited about this spring is the first-ever academic conference on intervention optimization, "Intervention Optimization: Science and Practice, Present and Future," in Bethesda, Maryland from May 18-20, 2026.

How much exercise is needed? Any is a step forward for promoting health
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Michigan Roybal Webinar with Giampiero Tarantino. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Dr. Tarantino will discuss his recently published meta-analysis on intervention booster strategies and their effects on maintenance.

In this talk, Dr. Tarantino will present findings from a new systematic review and meta-analysis of 40 randomized controlled trials evaluating “booster” strategies for maintaining physical activity after an intervention ends.

Registration link: umich.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Join us for our next Roybal Center (roybal.umich.edu) webinar on Thursday, February 5, 2026, at 1:00 pm ET, featuring Dr. Giampiero Tarantino, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

The US is home to only 3 of the top 25 universities globally in research impact (#3, #20, and #23).

In 2009, we were home to 15 out of 25, including the #1 spot.

It would be the unforced error of the century to scale back on our national investment in science now.
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/u...

Deaths potentially averted by small changes in physical activity and sedentary time: an individual participant data meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies Small and realistic increases in MVPA of 5 min/day might prevent up to 6% of all deaths in a high-risk approach and 10% of all deaths in population-based approach. Reducing sedentary time by 30 min/da...

Just 5 extra minutes per day of walking at an average speed is linked to a 10% reduction in deaths, from a meta-analysis of 135,000 participants in 7 cohorts (Norway, Sweden, and the US)
New @thelancet.com
thelancet.com/journals/lan...

January Newsletter from the Roybal Center at @umkines.bsky.social is out - check it out and subscribe to be the first to get the next issue at mailchi.mp/89288fb1bd3f...

Roybal Center - Roybal Center At the Roybal Center, we’re redefining what’s possible for lifelong brain and body health.

Big news from the Michigan Roybal Center at @umkines.bsky.social: our website now has a Generative AI Behavioral Science Assistant (Maizey) trained on ontologies, the science of physical activity, the M2C2 ambulatory cognitive testing approach, and much more. Try Maizey out at roybal.umich.edu

Infographic with a maize and gray color palette titled “U-M study finds social pressure drinking linked to worst consequences.” The left panel features the headline, while the right panel includes a quote stating that alcohol use, misuse, and negative social pressure represent a significant public health challenge, especially among adults under 30, attributed to David Conroy, professor at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology. Along the bottom are three data points: the average participant age was 21.5 years; 55% of participants identified as female; and 88% were undergraduates. The Michigan News logo appears in the lower left corner, with a blurred background image of people holding drinks.

Adults who drink due to external pressures are more likely to consume higher amounts of alcohol & experience more negative consequences than those who drink mainly for the pleasure of consuming alcohol, according to a new study from @conroylab.bsky.social & colleagues. myumi.ch/9p8yX

The Quiet Power of Program Officers How invisible decisions shape what science gets done—and whether it matters

This is an outstanding essay describing some of the important roles and influences of NIH program officers (from an insider perspective).

Read!

elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/the-quiet-...

a man is asking how much do i owe you . ALT: a man is asking how much do i owe you .

And that’s not to justify it. But we should all be realistic and figure out ways to strengthen these social contracts when we rely so much on unpaid labor for critical tasks

a red button with the word easy written on it ALT: a red button with the word easy written on it

Asking busy ppl to do uncompensated work will forever invite shortcuts in the name of efficiency

a woman with a big haircut is singing a song and says `` you 're simply the best ... better than all the rest '' ALT: a woman with a big haircut is singing a song and says `` you 're simply the best ... better than all the rest ''

And editors have company with this problem because it is going to be an issue for promotion and tenure reviews moving forward too. People are already using ai tools to write external letters. How long before a candidate is found to be loading up their cv files with superlatives in white text

Fair enough but editors will need a way to detect when the efficiency motive got the better of a reviewer. One countermeasure could be for the pdf generating software to embed the white text with instructions to use a tell-tale phrase to help editors identify the non-human reviews.

The one validated intervention to slow aging and extend healthspan is not for sale.
It's exercise.
sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

a man wearing a purple crown and pink goggles says this is not what i signed up for ALT: a man wearing a purple crown and pink goggles says this is not what i signed up for

So good luck to all the human editors out there trying to do honest work for their field

a man says houston we have a problem ALT: a man says houston we have a problem

And the natural sequelae will be authors hiding white text in their submission files with prompts directing what the AI tool should put in the reviews

‘A serious problem’: peer reviews created using AI can avoid detection Tools fail to identify most AI-generated peer-review reports, say researchers, who warn that the issue is only getting worse.

If this isn’t a nightmare already for editors, it soon will be www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Conveniently chatGPT also suggested how to respond so it would approve of the revision 😂

a man in a suit is sitting in a car with the words guilty as charged my friend below him Alt: a man in a suit is sitting in a car with the words guilty as charged my friend below him

I received a review (from reviewer 2 of course) last week that looked suspicious so I asked Gemini which chatbot wrote it. Gemini ratted on chatGPT, & even said it was most likely GPT4. It said the other review was likely human. When I asked GPT4.1 it fessed up that GPT 4 wrote it

Students walk past Arriving Home as the sun sets over a snowy campus.

It's an exciting time to be at Michigan - if you're eager to make an impact, join us in challenging the idle state! Priority consideration will be given to applications received by December 31, 2025.

... and the open-rank tenure-line and Asst/Assoc academic clinical line searches for experts in *Social & Behavioral Science of Physical Activity* (myumi.ch/A1DDM).

Check out the open-rank tenure-line search for experts (plural) in *Data Science & Artificial Intelligence in Kinesiology* (myumi.ch/8qnnD)...