About the Project
This fully funded PhD studentship is available in the School of Food Science and Nutrition in the Faculty of Environment and is aligned with the research programme within the Healthy and Sustainable Places (HASP) Smart Data Service.
This scholarship is open to UK and International applicants and covers tuition fees plus a maintenance matching UKRI stipend (currently £20,780 in 2025/26) and a research support fund.
We are looking for a talented and motivated individual to join a large and dynamic multidisciplinary project called Healthy and Sustainable Places (HASP) Smart Data Service.
This fully funded PhD place provides an exciting opportunity to pursue postgraduate research investigating the relationship between local food accessibility, purchasing behaviours (from sales data) and health outcomes (using NHS data). You will work with partner Nesta, and commercial and health data providers to address pressing challenges, using novel data relating to place. Not only will this contribute to the food and health domain evidence, but also unpick inequities in health.
The award is open to UK or International candidates on a full-time basis, or UK candidates on a part-time basis.
Food production and consumption are at the heart of the world greatest challenges, with 1 in 7 deaths globally attributed to poor diet and a third of global greenhouse gas emissions coming from food production. Measuring population diet has been notoriously challenging, with limited sample sizes and prone to bias, including selection and reporting bias. Despite this, diets are a convincing risk factor for a variety of health conditions, including obesity, cardiovascular disease and some cancers.
Food purchase data are an emerging source of smart data that present innovative opportunities to understand food purchasing behaviours at scale, in a timely manner. Using the HASP data service and partnerships with retailers, the NHS Secure Data Environment and social impact organisation Nesta this PhD offers a platform to use data science skills and domain area expertise for public good, driving wide reaching impact.
This PhD project Understanding the relationship between food behaviours and health outcomes will align with the HASP Keystone project Healthy behaviours, Healthy outcomes. The novel use of smart data from food providers, combined with health outcomes within the NHS secure data environment, will for the first time unlock insights into small areas patterns in behaviour and health outcome for places most in need of support and interventions to improve access the healthy and nutritious food, to improve a range of outcomes, including health.
During this PhD you will first understand food purchasing behaviours across different types of communities and how these may differ, before investigating the relationship of area demographics and purchasing behaviours with health outcomes. The final part of the research will investigate the impact of interventions to improve health outcomes. This may involve testing modelled scenarios using methods such as agent based modelling, or evaluate the impact of real-life interventions using a quasi-experimental design. One example could be investigating whether prescription of weight loss drugs impacts food shopping behaviours and subsequent health outcome – obesity – at a neighbourhood level.