Dr. Rebecca Pradeilles – MEALS4NCDs Project

Dr. Rebecca Pradeilles is a Senior Research Associate in Public Health Nutrition at Loughborough University (UK). She is currently working on an MRC-funded project investigating “New strategies to reduce anaemia and risk of overweight and obesity through complementary feeding of infants and young children in Peru” (project PI: Dr Emily Rousham).

After training as a dietician, she completed a Masters’ degree in Nutrition applied to low- and middle-income countries, followed by a Masters’ degree in Epidemiology and Public Health. She then completed a PhD in Public Health Nutrition in 2015, focusing on dietary and anthropometric transitions in a large cohort (Birth to Twenty) of urban South African adolescents at Loughborough University.

Whilst finishing her PhD, she was employed as a Lecturer in Public Health at the University of Sheffield (2015-2016). Following this post, she was employed as a Research Fellow in Global Health Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) to work on the Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) project (2016-2017). This project focused on women’s work in agriculture during/post pregnancy and its implications for undernutrition and health in both women and their offspring in rural Pakistan. From 2017 to 2019, she worked as a Research Fellow in Global Public Health Nutrition at the University of Sheffield, working on two projects on dietary transitions in African cities (Accra, Ho and Nairobi). In these projects, she co-led work packages on evidence synthesis, dietary assessment and in the use of innovative community-based participatory research methods, such as the Community Readiness Model and Photovoice.

Rebecca’s research interests are in the area of global health nutrition. She has research experience which has involved working in various contexts (Morocco, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya and Pakistan) in both infant and adult nutrition. Her work focuses on understanding the determinants of poor diets, malnutrition in all its forms (both undernutrition and overweight/obesity) and health in low- and middle-income countries using mixed-methods approaches. She also has interests in the assessment of diet and the food environment in resource-poor settings.