Julie Brimblecombe

Julie Brimblecombe is Associate Professor Public Health Nutrition, Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food, Monash University. Julie is passionate about addressing inequities in our food system and striving for a food system that is in balance with human and planet health. Having worked as a public health nutritionist, she is acutely aware of the potential and challenges that practitioners face when stepping in to a complex context such as the food retail space.

Her research has shown that both public health and business gains are possible through food retail approaches that harness the interest and expertise of the food retail sector and best practice evidence. With two-decades of real-world research and practice experience she hopes to inspire and support practitioners across the world to work hand-in-hand with the food retail sector for a healthier world.

Helen Wong

Helen Wong is trained as a dietitian. She has worked in clinical and research settings, where she has coordinated intervention studies and specialized in areas such as hyperlipidemia and obesity. She is currently a PhD candidate within the School of Health Administration, Faculty of Health at Dalhousie University. Her doctoral research involves a multi-methods approach to examine how online grocery shopping, and the use of digital touchpoints within shopping routines, contribute to food-related purchases and diets. Helen is passionate about leveraging technology for health promotion and non-communicable disease prevention within the population.

Amy Wilson

Amy Wilson has a background in psychology, marketing and health behaviour change. Amy is passionate about cross-disciplinary approaches to facilitating health and wellbeing of individuals and societies, and values the need for multi-stakeholder and multi-sectorial collaboration to achieve this. Her research has focused primarily on understanding consumer behaviour and the role of marketing as a driver of (un)healthy behaviours. She actively addresses the marketing myth (that marketing is the enemy of good health) by educating people and organisations about how marketing can be used to promote health and wellbeing across home, retail, community and public policy contexts. Amy’s passion for bridging the gap between health and marketing disciplines led her to develop and coordinate a new  award winning undergraduate course Marketing for Health and Wellbeing at the University of South Australia. She is also a regular guest speaker in other courses, seminars and conferences and as published text book chapters and academic articles on health marketing.

Neha Lalchandani

Dr Neha Lalchandani is a Research Fellow within the Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE), a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, at Deakin University. Her research focuses on advancing public health nutrition through creation of health-enabling environments guided by implementation science principles. Neha employs mixed-methods research and engages with a diverse group of partners, particularly supporting local governments to create healthier food retail environments in sports and recreation centres. She has a broad interest in the socio-ecological factors that influence food choices and health behaviours, as well as in social marketing and the design and delivery of health promotion initiatives.

Adyya Gupta

Dr. Adyya Gupta is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE) within Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University working in digital food retail environment. In her fellowship, she is developing a program of work to support healthy online food choices. She leads the Digital food retail environment Community of Practice within Nourish Network and has vast experience of working with multiple stakeholders. Adyya has an expertise in designing and applying mixed methods to study public health research. With a dental public health background, Adyya’s research focusses on generating evidence to address common risk factors for general and oral health to reduce chronic disease health burden. Adyya is passionate about building the evidence for effective and equitable policy and practice interventions to create supportive and healthy environment. Adyya’s research interests include social/commercial determinants of health, oral health, public health nutrition/ food policy and health promotion.

Emma McMahon

Dr Emma McMahon is an early-mid career research fellow within the Centre of Research Excellence (CRE) in Food Retail Environments for Health (RE-FRESH) at Menzies School of Health Research. Her research focuses on optimising food supply and environment in remote stores to improve nutrition in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. She is particularly interested in methods and tools for monitoring and evaluating healthy food retail strategies, use of store sales data to monitor nutrition indicators, and how reporting this information can support decision making to create health-enabling food environments. She has a PhD in nutrition, with her doctorate focusing on the effects of dietary salt on risk factors for cardiovascular disease and renal disease progression in people with chronic kidney disease.

Meaghan Christian

Meaghan is a public health nutrition researcher in the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food at Monash University. Her research has focused on addressing health inequities through improving the food environment.

She has technical skills specific to the evaluation of complex and novel public health nutrition interventions that inherently have many components that need to be accounted for in evaluation of feasibility and effectiveness.

Her PhD involved managing two parallel randomised controlled trials (RCT) devised to evaluate the Royal Horticultural Society’s Campaign for School Gardening, to determine if it has an effect on children’s fruit and vegetable intake.

Her research at Monash University is applying systems thinking to public health research to improve the food environments in the Australia population with a focus on remote Indigenous Australia’s.