The Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education is deeply saddened by the passing of Professor Katherine Tamminen, associate dean of graduate education, following a year-long battle with cancer.
Tamminen joined the Faculty in 2013 after completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of British Columbia. She earned her PhD from the University of Alberta in 2011, where her dissertation focused on stress management among adolescent athletes—an area that remained central to her scholarship throughout her career.
While working as a sport psychology consultant at a hockey academy, a conversation with young athletes about happiness and stress proved formative. One athlete shared that the most stressful part of sport was the car ride home, a realization that profoundly shaped Tamminen’s research trajectory. Supported by funding from the University of Toronto Connaught Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, she went on to lead several major research initiatives aimed at improving youth sport experiences. [Read more about Tamminen’s car ride home research]
Over the course of her career, Tamminen became an internationally recognized authority on stress, coping, and emotional processes in youth sport and adolescent athletes. She was also widely respected for her expertise in qualitative research methods and for her leadership in advancing open science practices within qualitative scholarship. [See full list of Tamminen’s publications]
At the University of Toronto, Tamminen taught undergraduate and graduate courses and founded the Sport and Performance Psychology Lab. She was an exceptional teacher and mentor, deeply committed to students’ academic, professional and personal development, and she was equally generous in mentoring junior faculty members within the Faculty and the broader scholarly community.
Her expertise was frequently sought in the development of physical activity reports for Canadian children and youth, and she was known for sharing practical strategies for managing stress with audiences ranging from university students to Olympians.
Tamminen served as editor-in-chief of the Psychology of Sport and Exercise journal, past president of the Canadian Society for Psychomotor Learning and Sport Psychology (SCAPPS), and member-at-large with the International Society of Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise.
Her mentorship, scholarship and generosity of spirit have left a lasting impact on the many students she guided, the colleagues who had the privilege of working alongside her, and the national and international sport psychology communities she helped shape.