research groups

Sustainable Healthy Food group

Health Behaviours Team

WHO Collaborating Centre for the Promotion of Healthy and Sustainable Diets

Human Sciences

Jess is a researcher in the Sustainable Healthy Food Group (part of the Health Behaviours Team) and Co-Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for the Promotion of Healthy and Sustainable Diets. She also convenes the Human Sciences Health and Disease course and Food Systems, Health, and Environment course, and supervises DPhil students (Margarida Bica and Shaniek Parks) and undergraduate dissertations.

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), SHIFT-UPFs project (exploring the health and health inequality effects of fiscal policy interventions that impact the purchase of ultra-processed foods), 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. Advertised DPhil projects for 2026/27 entry can be found here.