Fernanda Arthuso received her PhD in Behavioral Medicine from the University of Alberta in 2024, where she studied the role of exercise following bladder and kidney cancer diagnoses. During her time at the University of Alberta, she also contributed to the CHALLENGE study, which provided the most definitive evidence to date demonstrating that exercise improves survival and reduces cancer recurrence in patients with stage III/high risk stage II colon cancer after chemotherapy. She subsequently held a postdoctoral position at the University of Alberta, where she led a project examining associations between breast cancer treatment modalities and changes in health-related fitness using data from the Alberta Moving Beyond Breast Cancer (AMBER) cohort study. Fernanda serves as a committee member of the International Society of Exercise Oncology (ISEO) Webinar Series.
Her research program focuses on the role of exercise in helping people with cancer prepare for treatment, tolerate and respond to treatment, recover after treatment, and improve long-term cancer outcomes. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach to exercise oncology, incorporating health-related fitness, patient-reported outcomes, motivational outcomes, and clinical cancer outcomes. Her ultimate goal is to generate definitive evidence to inform whether and how exercise can be integrated as a cancer treatment to enhance both clinical outcomes and quality of life across the cancer care continuum.