research groups

Sustainable Healthy Food group

Health Behaviours Team

WHO Collaborating Centre for Non-communicable Disease Prevention

Human Sciences

Jess is a researcher in the Sustainable Healthy Food Group (part of the Health Behaviours Team). She also convenes the Human Sciences Health and Disease course and Food Systems, Health, and Environment course; supervises DPhil students (Margarida Bica and Shaniek Parks) and undergraduate dissertations; and works closely with the World Health Organization on noncommunicable disease and diet projects.

Jess’s research interests include population approaches for NCD prevention, public health policymaking, healthy and sustainable diet promotion, systems research, and the co-production of interventions. Jess is currently working on the SALIENT project (evaluating healthy and sustainable food trials in retail settings), SHIFT project (developing a toolkit for delivering a 30% reduction in meat consumption in the UK by 2032), COPPER project (designing food subsidy and tax scenarios with the public and policymakers), and Newham co-production project (co-producing an action plan for improving diets in the London Borough of Newham using systems mapping approaches).

Jess completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford in August 2021. Her thesis was entitled ‘From information to action: towards context-specific nutrition and noncommunicable disease research, interventions, and policies in Sri Lanka’, and used both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Before joining NDPH, she completed a Master of Public Health and a Bachelor of Biomedicine at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Jess would be delighted to hear from prospective DPhil students and researchers interested in collaborating.