Susan Jebb


Susan Ann Jebb is a nutrition scientist, and the Professor of Diet and Population Health at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. She is the UK Government's advisor on obesity in the United Kingdom.

Early life

She was born Susan Ann Parkinson. She studied at Surrey University on a course which included a six-month placement in an oncology research group at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London.

Career

She is interested in how what we eat affects the risk of gaining weight or becoming obese and the interventions that might be effective to help people lose weight or reduce the risk of obesity-related diseases. She has conducted a series of randomised controlled trials to study the impact of dietary changes on the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Her work has highlighted how a referral to commercial weight management weight loss programmes delivered in the community is a cost-effective way to treat obesity in primary care. Her recent work studied how our perception of portion size as normal or smaller than normal affect the amount of food we eat and how shoppers can be influenced to choose decreased salt alternatives at the grocery store.
She is very interested in how scientific evidence on diet is translated into policy and practice by government, industry, the public health community and the media. She was the science advisor for the Foresight obesity report and subsequently chaired the cross-government Expert Advisory Group on obesity and the Responsibility Deal Food Network. She is now a member of the Public Health England Obesity Programme Board and one of the Chairs of the NICE Public Health Advisory Committees. She is actively involved in a number of events and media projects to engage the public in issues relating to diet and health. In 2008 she was awarded an OBE for services to public health and in 2018 was appointed Fellow of the Medical Academy of Sciences.

Medical Research Council

She was Head of Nutrition and Health Research at the MRC Human Nutrition Research in Cambridge.

University of Oxford

She chairs the Food Network on the Department of Health's Public Health Responsibility Deal.
In 2008 she was awarded the OBE for services to public health.
In 2014 she gave advice on the UK government's outlawing of sugary drinks for children.

Personal life

She married in June 1990 in Ellesmere, Shropshire and has a son born 2001 in Cambridge.