The UBVO tackles the problem of obesity from a multidisciplinary perspective.Its research fellows bring wide-ranging expertise from diverse fields including anthropology, cancer epidemiology, economic history, politics, and public health.
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Dr Steve Allender
is a Senior Researcher of the British Health Foundation Health Promotion Research Group, which he joined in July 2005. He is lead researcher for the coronary heart disease statistics project. Steve is also responsible for the www.heartstats.org website, the most comprehensive and up-to-date source of statistics on CVD in the UK. |
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Dr Amanda Berlan
is a Research Fellow in Marketing, Culture & Society at the Said Business School. A social anthropologist with substantial qualitative research experience, she is currently developing new research on child obesity.
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Dr Inge Daniels
is a University Lecturer in Visual and Material Culture at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her
research interests include consumption, gift exchange, anthropology of space and everyday religious practices. She has recently published a book entitled
The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home. |
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Dr Charlie Foster
is a Senior Researcher of the British Health Foundation Health Promotion Research Group. His research includes analysis of EPIC-Norfolk cohort data to determine relationships between local environments and physical activity levels. He also leads systematic reviews of the evidence of effectiveness of a range of physical activity interventions for adults and children for the Cochrane Collaboration and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
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Professor Tim Key
is the Deputy Unit Director for Oxford's Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit. His main interests are the roles of diet and hormones in the aetiology of
cancer, particularly cancers of the breast, prostate and colon. He is the principal investigator for EPIC-Oxford and the
chairman of the EPIC prostate cancer working group. Additionally, he serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition.
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Professor Klim McPherson
is a Professor of Public Health Epidemiology. He recently sat on the Committee on Safety of Medicines and is currently Vice-Chairman of the National Heart Forum. Additionally, he serves on the Public Health Interventions Advisory Council and on a Guideline Development Group of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). He recently developed an epidemiological model of the long-term effects of rising childhood obesity in the UK, which informed the Foresight 'Tackling Obesities: Future Choices' project report that he co-authored.
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Professor Avner Offer
is the Chichele Professor of Economic History and a Fellow of All Souls College and the British Academy. Over the past decade his main interest has been in post-war economic growth, particularly in affluent societies, and the challenges that this affluence presents to well-being. His recent book The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950 applies a dynamic framework of myopic choice to explain emergent social trends, including obesity, within these two countries.
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Dr Deborah Oxley
is a lecturer in Economic History and Fellow of All Souls College. Her expertise in anthropometric history underscores her research into relationships among stature and weight in European populations, and the impact that body mass has upon economic performance in society from the individual to the national level. Her research interests also include Australian convicts and coercive labour systems, migration studies, microeconomics of the household, gender and ageing.
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Dr Caroline Potter
is a lecturer in Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her research is concerned with how everyday practice, including that related to food consumption and habitual activity, is socially shaped. She is currently exploring the historical onset of population obesity in the UK and the political, economic, and cultural changes that fostered it.
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Dr Mike Rayner
is Director of the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group, which he founded in 1994. From 1986 to 1993 he was Senior Research Officer for the Coronary Prevention Group - at the time the leading national voluntary organisation concerned with the prevention of coronary heart disease - and he is currently Chair of the Nutrition Expert Group of the European Heart Network. His research focuses on the development of public interventions to improve diet and activity levels in the UK, with particular emphasis on food labelling, food pricing, and the marketing of foods to children.
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Dr Harry Rutter
is a public health consultant based in Oxford. He is director of the newly established National Obesity Observatory and is an honorary senior clinical lecturer in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, where he teaches on climate change and childhood obesity. He is a member of the Department of Health Expert Panel on Obesity, and he sat on the management group of the Foresight Tackling Obesities project. He has a broad interest in the relationships between transport, the built environment and health, in particular the health impacts of walking and cycling.
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Dr Elizabeth Spencer
is the nutritionist for the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) in Oxford. Liz trained in biochemistry, nutrition and epidemiology and has special interests in obesity and physical activity, plant foods and cancer, and fatty acids in health and disease. She is interested in pooling resources to work towards practical solutions to the obesity epidemic.
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Dr Devi Sridhar
is a Fellow in Politics at All Souls College and Director of the Global Health Governance Project in the Global Economic Governance Programme. Her research interests focus on the politics of global health and global health governance with a regional focus on South Asia.
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Professor Stanley Ulijaszek (director)
is Professor of Human Ecology within the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. His research interests include patterns of human growth and development as markers of well-being, the relationships between nutrition and reproduction in tropical seasonal environments, and the effects of economic modernisation on nutritional health. He has carried out research in India, Nepal, Sarawak, Bangladesh and the Cook Islands, and maintains ongoing research in Papua New Guinea and Poland.
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Professor Harvey Whitehouse
is Head of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and a Professor of Social Anthropology.
He is also Director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mind. His research interests include cultural transmission, cognitive science of culture, religion and ritual.
He has carried out ethnographic field research in Papua New Guinea, and in recent years he has focused his energies on the development of collaborative programmes of research.
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Dr Madelief Bertens
is a lecturer and researcher at the Athena Institute for Research on Innovation and Communication in Health and Life Sciences, VU Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Previously based in Oxford at UBVO, her expertise lies in health communication and health promotion.
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Dr Kaushik Bose
is Head of the Department of Anthropology at Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, India.
His work has focussed on chronic disease risk among South Asians, initially in the United Kingdom and subsequently in his native West Bengal.
He has researched obesity in India since 2001, showing that it is of increasing concern not only for the urban middle classes,
but also for some rural populations.
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Professor Claudio Franceschi
is a Professor of Immunology at the University of Bologna, Italy. He has been Associate Editor of “Aging, Clinical and Experimetal Research” since 1989 and is Coordinator of the Biological Study Session of the Italian Multicentric Study of centenarians.
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Professor Maciej Henneberg
is the Wood Jones Professor of Anthropological and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, where he is Head of the Department of Anatomical Sciences. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Comparative Human Biology, HOMO,
and heads the Biological Anthropology and Comparative Anatomy Research Unit (BACARU).
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Professor John Komlos
is Professor of Economics and Chair of the
Institute of Economic History at the University of Munich, Germany. He is editor of Economics and Human Biology, a journal devoted to the exploration of the effect of socio-economic processes on human beings as biological organisms.
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Dr Slawomir Koziel
is a biological anthropologist based at the Polish Academy of Sciences. His work involves mathematical modelling and statistical analysis of large anthropometric datasets, particularly with respect to changing patterns of physical growth and development of children across periods of socio-political and economic change. His work on the onset of obesity among Polish children suggests that the social class inversion of overweight and obesity in Polish society took place prior to the collapse of communism. |