Oddrun Samdal

Biography

Samdal was certified as a teacher at Bergen University College in 1990, and in 1992 she completed her master studies in Nutrition, health and environmental issues at Stabekk University College (now University College of Oslo and Akershus ). In 1999 she defended her dr.philos degree at the University of Bergen, Faculty of Psychology, with the thesis The school environment as a risk or resource for students' health-related behaviours and subjective well-being.

After her master study Samdal worked one year as a teacher at Misje skule in the municipality of Fjell kommune outside Bergen before she in 1993 entered as an employee at the Research Centre for Health Promotion (now Department of Health Promotion and Development,) at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Bergen. During the following years she started out as a PhD candidate, later worked as a university lecturer and post doctor. In 2002 Samdal got a permanent position as Associate Professor of Health Promotion/Health Psychology. From 2007 she is Professor in the same position.

In her research Oddrun Samdal has taken a special interest in adolescent health and health behaviours. She has done extensive studies of how students’ perceive their work environment at school and how these experiences relate to their reported health behaviours, health and life satisfaction. Similarly she has studied correlates of physical activity in young people. Samdal has also taken a special interest in intervention studies addressing both implementation and effect studies of health promotion initiatives in schools and adolescents' leisure settings.

Oddrun Samdal has volunteered at several occasions to community service at the University of Bergen. During 2004-2005 she was the department chair at the Department of Health and Education that was established the same year. The following year she was asked to become the vise dean of education at the Faculty of Psychology and served in this position until 2009.

National Community Service

From 1999 to 2004, Samdal was appointed as member of the first national board of physical activity in the Directorate of health under the Ministry of Health. During the same period she was also member of the Child and Family board of the Norwegian national Association of Public Health. Samdal has further served in several evaluation committees for the Directorates of Education and Health. Since 2011, Samdal is the chair of the program board for Public Health in the Norwegian Research Council.

International Research Leadership & Management

Internationally, Samdal has since 1999 served as Data Manager in the "Health Behaviour in School-aged Children: WHO collaborative Cross-National Survey” (HBSC). Currently more than 40 countries in Europe and North-America participate in the study and Samdal is also the Principal Investigator in Norway. Every fourth year nationally representative data from 11-, 13- and 15- year olds are collected in all countries. The cleaning and the storage of the data takes place the Databank at the University of Bergen in collaboration with the Norwegian Social Science Data Services. Once the data is puted up together, this information is aviable to external researchers.

In 1993 Samdal was appointed by the Ministry of health and Ministiry of Education to serve as the Norwegian national coordinator of the European network of Health Promoting Schools (now Schools for health in Europe ). Throughout 10 years she worked closely with 10 pilot schools in Norway to develop models for implementing health promotion in school. These models were later taken forward in the national intervention projects “Physical activity and healthy meals in schools” and “All day school”.

Currently, Samdal is work package leader in two EU (FP7) funded projects; PAPA (Promoting Adolescent health through an intervention aimed at improving the quality of their participation in Physical Activity) and SPOTLIGHT (Sustainable prevention of obesity through integrated strategies), that aims to increase and combine knowledge on the wide range of determinants of obesity in a systematic way, and to identify multi-level intervention approaches that are strong in terms of Reach, Efficacy, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance.

Samdal is fluent in English and Spanish and has had long term (6–18 months) research visits at Sydney University (1995) San Diego State University (2001) and University of Valencia (2010–2011).