Asha Kaur

Asha’s research looks at population diets and the diet and health impacts of different marketing techniques. Her research interests include food prices, labelling, nutrient profiling, and population-level health modelling. Asha teaches on the NDPH MSc Global Health Science programme, the Medical Sciences Division Clinical training programme, and on the Human Sciences undergraduate course.  

Asha was awarded a Nuffield Department of Population Health (NDPH) Intermediate Fellowship titled “TransforMMMD: TRANSFORming UK population dietary advice into Micro, Meso, and Macro Diets and measuring their health, cost, and environmental impacts”. This project builds upon Asha’s earlier work modeling the potential diet, cost and health implications of achieving the Eatwell Guide (the UK government’s dietary advice). Prior to this Asha was awarded an NDPH Early Career Fellowship to investigate the impact of price promotions on dietary choices and health outcomes.  

Asha is a Work Package leader for the COPPER project. The aim of the COPPER project is to work with public and policymakers to co-design tax and subsidy scenarios and then estimate the health, economic and environmental impact of these scenarios. Other projects that Asha worked on include SALIENT and SHIFT. She has also been involved in multiple literature reviews including systematic reviews on health-related claims and price promotions.

Asha's DPhil thesis involved measuring the prevalence and nutritional quality of foods carrying health and nutrition claims and modelling the diet and health impact of different potential regulatory scenarios. Prior to this, Asha graduated in 2005 with a BSc in Clinical Psychology from the University of Kent. Asha joined the University of Oxford in 2006 working as a Research Assistant with the Health Services Research Unit working on a systematic review of forensic mental health outcomes.