Sport psychology expert Mustafa Sarkar’s career is progressing by leaps and bounds, after he gained his PhD, won another award and secured a permanent job in academia.
Mustafa (1997–2004) was awarded his PhD in Sport Psychology from Loughborough University in July. After the completion of a two-year post-doctoral role as a Research Fellow at the University of Gloucestershire, he has now taken up a permanent Lecturing post in Sport Psychology at Nottingham Trent University in September, where he teaches across the undergraduate and post-graduate Sport Science degree programmes.
Mustafa was also awarded the British Psychological Society (BPS) Division of Sport and Exercise Psychology (DSEP) PhD award for 2015 – the latest in a series of awards and prizes that he has won over the last few years.
After taking A-levels in Economics, Chemistry and Mathematics at QE, Mustafa spent a gap year working for PricewaterhouseCoopers as an assistant tax consultant for eight months and travelled in South America for three months.
He went to Loughborough University, from where he graduated in July 2008 with a first-class honours degree in Sport and Exercise Science. He then went on to complete a Post Graduate Diploma in Psychology (with Distinction) from Middlesex University.
In 2009, he was named Xcel Sports Student of the Year, with the judges praising him for his academic work, for coaching cricket with Loughborough school children, for climbing five UK mountains for charity and for running the London Marathon for charity, raising £2,350.
Other awards he has won include Loughborough University’s Sir Robert Martin Faculty Prize for academic and non-academic achievements and the Head of School’s Postgraduate Prize for Academic Excellence, awarded annually to the student with the highest overall mark in a Masters Programme. He also received the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences (BASES) Masters Dissertation of the Year Award in 2011.
At the time of the London 2012 Olympics, he made headlines in the mainstream press with a piece of in-depth research – conducted jointly with his Loughborough supervisor (Dr. David Fletcher) – which looked into the psychology of 12 Olympic Gold Medal winners, exploring how resilience helped them to achieve success.
In his new Lecturing post at Nottingham Trent University, Mustafa is Module Leader for ‘Advanced Topics in Sport and Exercise Psychology’ as well as contributing to several other modules across the undergraduate curriculum (eg ‘Introduction to Research’). He is also Leader for the postgraduate module, ‘Current Issues in Sport and Exercise Psychology’.
Mustafa is married to Tasnim, who is a qualified speech therapist workjing in the NHS. His younger brother, Mustali (OE 2000–2007) got married in 2013, just a few months after Mustafa’s wedding.