I have recently started my PhD at the University of Leeds.

My project, Understanding the relationship between food behaviours and health outcomes, is based in the School of Food Science and Nutrition within the Faculty of Environment. The research is supported by the Healthy and Sustainable Places (HASP) Smart Data Service and funded through a doctoral studentship. I am supervised by Professor Nik Lomax and Professor Michelle Morris (Note: Dr Stephen Clark joined the supervision team later).

What the PhD is about

The project explores how local food accessibility and food purchasing behaviours relate to health outcomes across different places.

In practice, this involves bringing together food purchase and sales data with NHS health data to better understand:

• how food purchasing behaviours vary across communities
• how neighbourhood context and demographics shape these behaviours
• how purchasing patterns relate to health outcomes
• how policy or place-based interventions might improve outcomes in areas most in need The project also offers the opportunity to work with novel place-based data and collaborate with partners such as Nesta, commercial data providers, and the NHS secure data environment.

Why it matters to me

This PhD sits at the intersection of several topics that interest me: food behaviour, health inequalities, spatial context, and the use of data science to inform public policy.

Over the next few years, the research will move from understanding patterns in food purchasing behaviour, to linking these patterns with health outcomes, and ultimately to exploring potential interventions through modelling and evaluation.

I am very glad to be starting this next chapter in Leeds.