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| Principal Investigator | Professor Russell Viner (Director), |
| Co-investigators | Professor Mark Hamer, |
| UCL team members | Dr Helen Croker, |
| Project start and end dates | September 2017-September 2022 |
| Funder | NIHR Policy Research Programme |
| Project website | https://www.ucl.ac.uk/obesity-policy-research-unit/ |
Project Aims
Our vision is for a policy research unit in which world-class researchers from a broad range of backgrounds, working with patient / public representatives, use cutting-edge methodologies to provide the evidence needed to help government deploy policy to reduce the prevalence and burden of obesity and its comorbidities across the life-course.
Our core aim is to undertake inter-disciplinary research of the highest quality to support the development, implementation and evaluation of national and local policy to combat obesogenic environments and systems, modify behaviours relevant to obesity, reduce health inequalities and the consequences of obesity across the lifecourse, with a particular focus on children and young people.
Obesity is a systemic and inter-sectoral problem. Policy responses need to be designed to work within the systems within which they will be deployed, and we will plan all our work to include consideration of broader systems and their intersections. Further, we will seek to identify where interventions can be mutually reinforcing and deliver co-benefits within systems.
Project details
Our work is carried out across four workstreams:
- Child and adolescent obesity – led by Russell Viner at the Institute for Child Health (UCL)
- Environment and behaviour change- led by Andrew Steptoe at the Department of Behavioural Science and Health (UCL)
- Economic analysis- led by Rachel Griffith at the Institute for Fiscal Studies
- Food systems and policy analysis- led by Corinna Hawkes at the Centre for Food Policy at City University
We are carrying out a wide range of studies, the details are available on our website:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/obesity-policy-research-unit/research
Key Publications
Our publications are available here:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/obesity-policy-research-unit/publications