Dr Amy McLennan is a Research Fellow at the 3A Institute of the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She is an experienced senior policy analyst, having previously worked in the Australian Government Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the South Australian Department of Health. She recent experience with Australian design consultance ThinkPlace Global. Her research includes fieldwork on obesity and non-communicable diseases in the Pacific Islands,  and collaborative projects which focus on food, health policy, loneliness, non-communicable diseases, digital health and anatomical sciences.

Zofia Boni is a social anthropologist and sociologist, Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. She studies moral economies and affective politics of children's food. She has conducted ethnographic research on the social dynamics of childhood obesity in Poland. Her research and teaching focuses on the anthropologies of food, body, health and environment, with a particular attention to young people’s lived experiences and their own embodied perspectives on fatness and health. She collaborates across disciplines, with an interest in childhood obesity as a biosocial phenomenon.​

Professor Harry Rutter is Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Bath. He was the founding Director of the National Obesity Observatory 2007-2011, and remains its strategic and scientific advisor. He led the establishment of the Department of Health National Child Measurement Programme, and was a core contributor to the WHO Health Economic Assessment Tool for Walking and Cycling. He has a broad interest in the relationships between transport, the built environment and health, in particular the health impacts of walking and cycling.

Dr Tess Bird is a medical and visual anthropologist interested in uncertainty, wellbeing and happiness, futures making, obesity and nutrition, and the material culture of the home. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Writing in the Social Sciences at Wesleyan University, she is developing writing and teaching tools for the social sciences that draw from her research and practice with uncertainty.

Michèle Belot is Professor of Economics at Cornell University and has been interested in understanding how one can support the formation of healthier dietary habits among children, and particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Her work applies insights from behavioral economics to design interventions. These interventions are then evaluated with randomized controlled trials. Examples of interventions include the use of small incentives to taste fruit and vegetables at school, access to mindfulness training programs or access to food baskets and recipes to prepare healthy meals. The evidence from these studies shows that behavioral change is challenging, but is easier and more effective at younger ages.  

Professor Kaushik Bose is Head of the Department of Anthropology at Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, India. His work has focused 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 rural populations.

Dr Slawomir Koziel is Director, Polish Academy of Sciences, Anthropology Unit in Wroclaw. A biological anthropologist, 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 and emergence of obesity  across periods of socio-political and economic change.

Paulina Nowicka is Professor of Food Studies, Nutrition and Dietetics, especially Communication of Dietetics, at Uppsala University. Working across the medical and the social sciences, the projects she leads investigate how lifestyle patterns develop across generations what type of childhood obesity interventions are effective in clinical settings and how to promote communication about obesity that validates the experiences of people and communities. Her research is inspired by experiences at the Childhood Obesity Unit at the Pediatric Hospital in Malmö, Sweden, where she worked for almost a decade as a clinician. She has served on many expert committees and boards such as Childhood Obesity Task Force of the European Association for the Study on Obesity (EASO), European Childhood Obesity Group (ECOG) and Swedish Association for the Study on Obesity (SFO).

Michelle Pentecost is a physician-anthropologist working at the intersections of medicine, public health, anthropology, and medical education. She is Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Kings College London. Her anthropological research sits at the intersections of medical anthropology and science and technology studies within anthropology’s growing corpus of critical studies of global health, including critical analysis of ‘the first thousand days’ approaches to childhood health and nutrition.

Tanja Schneider is Permanent Lecturer in sociology at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland. Her research interests focus on Science and Technology Studies, the Sociology of Consumption and the Sociology and Anthropology of Food.

​

​

Dr. Kleberg Hansen, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Copenhagen, is an historian whose research involves exploring concepts and perceptions of fatness in Western European medicine between 1700 and 1900. Within this, she examines how both historians and contemporary scientists rely on historical narratives when making sense of the notion of an epidemic of fat bodies in present-day society.

Megan Warin is a social anthropologist and Professor in the School of Social  Sciences, University of Adelaide, Australia. Her teaching and research interests coalesce around the gendering of health and illness, the embodiment of food and memory, public understanding of scientific paradigms of obesity, and social theories.

Professor Steve Allender, Deakin University, Australia, has an ongoing program of research on the burden of disease and obesity prevention. Recent work has seen a particular interest in the emerging burden of chronic disease in developing countries and the possibilities for using complex systems methodologies in community based interventions. Further work is in the development and understanding of community based approaches to chronic disease prevention. He is Deputy Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University and a member of the Oxford Health Alliance, University of Oxford.

Professor John Komlos is Visiting Professor of Economics, Duke University, and formerly Professor of Economics at the University of Munich. He was instrumental in the emergence of anthropometric history, the study of the effect of economic development on human biological outcomes, including obesity. He is Founding Editor of the journal Economics and Human Biology.