research groups

Diet, Data and Interventions Group

WHO Collaborating Centre for Non-communicable Disease Prevention

Jess is the Deputy Director of Clinical Teaching, Co-Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Population Approaches for Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) Prevention (WHO CCPNP), and a researcher in the Diet, Data and Interventions Group. She also convenes the Human Sciences Health and Disease Option Course and organises the Short Course on Prevention Strategies for NCDs. 

Jess’s research interests include population approaches for NCD prevention, public health policymaking, healthy and sustainable diet promotion, and the co-production of interventions. Jess is currently working alongside Dr Prachi Bhatnagar and Prof Peter Scarborough to co-produce an action plan for the reduction of unhealthy food consumption 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.