The World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for the Promotion of Healthy and Sustainable Diets designation will run for four years. It recognises the team’s global leadership in research at the intersection of food systems, health, and environmental sustainability.
As a designated Collaborating Centre, the team will contribute to WHO’s work on the promotion of healthy and sustainable diets, particularly in the WHO European Region. This includes supporting the development and implementation of nutrient profile models, a key policy tool for public health nutrition, and contributing to capacity-building initiatives by developing and delivering training courses in collaboration with WHO colleagues.
A multidisciplinary team of experts
The new Centre will be co-directed by Dr Jessica Renzella and Professor Mike Rayner, who previously led a WHO Collaborating Centre on Population Approaches for Non-Communicable Disease Prevention (2013–2021) in Oxford Population Health.
This new designation reflects a shift in the team’s focus, towards integrating health, sustainability, and food policy to address today’s complex global nutrition challenges. Dr Renzella and Professor Rayner will work closely with Professor Peter Scarborough, Principal Investigator of the Sustainable Healthy Food Group in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences (NDPCHS), alongside early-career, mid-career, and senior researchers with diverse expertise, from health and environmental modelling to qualitative, co-production research methods.