EUFAPA

The website for the European Federation of Adapted Physical Activity (EUFAPA) can be found the following website;

http://www.eufapa.eu/

Regional Representatives

Piritta Asunta

Piritta AsuntaDr. Piritta Asunta works as a researcher at LIKES Research Centre for Physical Activity and Health, located in Jyväskylä, Finland. Her background is in sport pedagogy with a special interest in adapted physical activity (APA) and adapted physical education (APE). She has served in a national adapted physical activity education and research working group since 2016. This group works in collaboration with the National Sports Council’s Section for Non-discrimination, Equality and Sustainable Development. In addition to research, Dr. Asunta teaches adapted physical education to PE students at the University of Turku.

Her special expertise and research interests focus on motor learning and assessment, adapted physical education, intellectual disabilities, Special Olympics and motor learning difficulties, which she has studied in her doctoral thesis. She represents Finland in the International ISR-DCD Working Group on Developmental Coordination Disorder. She was one of the key persons in organizing DCD13 conference in Finland in 2019. She has developed the Finnish version of Motor observational questionnaire for teachers (MOQ-T) and she is currently developing a cultural adaption for Little DCDQ questionnaire for parents and preschool teachers. Asunta has cooperated in a transnational study where they made an initial validation of a short, self-report measure on social inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities. Currently she is developing adapted Move! measurements for students with functional difficulties in Finland. Move! is a national physical functional capacity monitoring and feedback system for Finnish 5th and 8th grade pupils.

email: Piritta.asunta@likes.fi 

Alba Roldan

Contact: aroldan@umh.es

University: Miguel Hernández University (Elche)

Academic Title: Assistant Professor, Ph.D.

Alba RoldanDr. Alba Roldan is assistant profesor at the Miguel Hernández University (UMH), where she defended her Ph.D in 2017 about Paralympic Classification in athletes with high support needs. She holds a European Master’s Degree from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Erasmus Mundus Master in Adapted Physical Activity – EMMAPA) and a specialization course in Psychomototherapy for people with mental health disorders at the same university. From 2014-2016, she worked as coordinator of the International Master’s Program in Adapted Physical Activity (IMAPA).

She teaches on the degree in physical activity and sport sciences and on the degree in occupational therapy. She also holds the position of secretary of the UMH’s TEMPE-APSA Chair of Disability and Employability, a university course for students with intellectual disability. In this program, she coordinates a subject in Applied Physical Activity.

In the last years, she has been leading different research and transfer projects in APA. Her main lines of research are aimed at: i) para sport classification as a tool to increasing the participation of athletes with cerebral palsy (i.e. Boccia and Football); ii) designing programs to improve the self-efficacy of physical education teachers towards the inclusion of students with disabilities; iii) the use of physical activity to improve the employability skills of young people with intellectual disabilities and autism spectrum disorder.