Eliana Carraça

Eliana V. Carraça is an Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Educação Física e Desporto, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisboa, Portugal. She is a clinical exercise physiologist, with a master in exercise and health, and received her Ph.D. in Health and Fitness in 2012. She has also received a Best Master Student award in 2009. Her research revolves around the field of motivational, self-regulatory and behavioural predictors of physical activity, eating behaviour and weight management. She is especially interested in the interplay and cross-behavioural regulation between physical activity and eating-self regulation, especially at the mechanistic level. She explores the mediating role of motivational dynamics (based on self-determination theory) and potential interactions with other psychological and non-psychological factors that might contribute to physical activity/exercise function as a gateway behaviour for healthy eating. Additionally, she has been involved in the design of health behaviour change interventions applying self-determination theory (in overweight/obese women and recreational runners). She has published 45 international peer-reviewed articles (h-index Scopus 14; h-index Google Scholar 20; 2606 citations), 10 national articles, was a co-author of 4 international and 2 national book chapters, and has received 6 awards and/or honours. She integrated the EASO (European Association for the Study of Obesity) Physical Activity Working Group, which drafted the first EASO recommendations for physical activity in adults with overweight or obesity, in collaboration with several leading researchers in the field of Obesity. She is currently the principal investigator of PAC-WOMAN (recently funded by FCT), a national project that will test a physical activity behaviour change intervention for post-menopausal breast cancer survivors on aromatase inhibitors. She was also the co-coordinator of KoR (Keep on Running) national project, a digital (brief) intervention study designed to increase sustained adherence to recreational running in a naturalistic environment. In the past, she has participated in the SPOTLIGHT project, funded by the European Commission (FP7), and in several FCT-funded projects (the PESO Study, the "Physical Activity and the Self-Regulation of Eating Behaviour and Body Weight" project, the Open-Access Repository of Self-Regulation Measures for Exercise, Eating, and Weight Control).