Masamitsu Kamada

Masamitsu KAMADA, MEd, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Department of Health Education and Health Sociology at the School of Public Health, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, JAPAN. His work focuses on physical activity epidemiology, mainly elucidating the health benefits of physical activity and effective ways to promote physical activity. He has a unique expertise in studying population-wide social and behavioral interventions. His recent study is the first ever study to examine the effectiveness of a multi-strategic community-wide intervention using social marketing to increase population-level physical activity in middle-aged and older adults by a randomized study with community as the unit of randomization (IJBNPA, 2013 & 2015; IJE 2018). The study was rated as the lowest risk of bias among 33 reviewed studies by a Cochrane Review paper. Through these experiences, He was invited to and participated in the process of building a reporting guideline for randomized studies of social and psychological interventions (CONSORT-SPI). He has also conducted epidemiologic studies on relationships between physical activity and non-communicable diseases. His previous research showed a dose-response relationship between sports activity and musculoskeletal pain in adolescents (PAIN, 2016). As a project coordinator of the Physical Activity Ancillary Study of the Women’s Health Study at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School (PI: Dr. I-Min Lee), he had been managing a large-scale cohort study with approximately 18,000 participants recruited from throughout the US and examining the relationship between physical activity assessed by accelerometers and various health outcomes (e.g., Lee et al., 2019 JAMA Intern Med [2019 Altmetric Top 100 paper]).
During his postdoctoral training at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, he developed and taught the first nanocourse focusing on physical activity in the school with his colleague fellows (An Introduction to Physical Activity: From Wearable Technology to Social Interventions).
He has been leading several physical activity research projects, including a large-scale smartphone-based physical activity promotion project using fandom-based gamification techniques with the Japanese professional baseball league (Pacific League, MSSE 2022). In 2020, the project received The Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Excellence Award (The 9th Smart Life Project Award ).
He co-authored the Lancet Physical Activity Series paper on the Olympic Games and population physical activity, published in 2021. He served as a committee member of the Early Career Network of the International Society for Physical Activity and Health (ISPAH) from 2017 to 2020, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Physical Activity and Health.