Advisory Board
Our Advisory Board
Dr Gillian Purdon
Dr Gillian Purdon leads the Food Standards Scotland (FSS) Nutrition Science and Policy Branch and manages their Nutrition Programme. Gillian worked for the Food Standards Agency in Scotland for ten years as a senior public health nutrition advisor. Her career followed an MSc in Human Nutrition followed by a PhD and 6 years of postdoctoral positions focused on energy metabolism and diabetes research. In her current role she leads a team of registered public health nutritionists to publish a robust national picture of trends in diet and nutrition and disseminate the science and evidence base to influence policy development to improve diet in Scotland.
Prof Peter Craig
Prof Peter Craig is co-leader of the Inequalities in Health research programme at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow. Before joining the University in 2014, he worked for the UK and Scottish Governments as a researcher and research manager. From 2006-11 he combined this role with managing the MRC's Population Health Sciences Research Network. His research seeks to develop and apply robust methods for the evaluation of policies that affect population health, with a particular focus on systems of social protection and the use of natural experimental approaches. (Google Scholar, ORCID).
Polly Page
Polly Page is the programme director for measurements and surveys at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge. She oversees a coordinated platform for the measurement of diet, anthropometry, physical activity and nutritional biomarkers. Polly leads the Dietary Assessment group and is co-director for the government funded National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) Rolling Programme. She is responsible for the development, maintenance and provision of Intake24 including in the UK NDNS, and supports development and access to Intake24 for wider research application in the UK and internationally. Polly has led and overseen the delivery of large-scale biomedical surveys and studies for more than ten years and has been the Cambridge NDNS lead since 2010.
Gillian Swan
Gillian Swan is a senior scientific officer in the dietary surveys and food composition team of the new Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) at the Department of Health and Social Care. She manages the contract for the UK NDNS Rolling Programme and most recently has worked on the major change from a food diary to Intake24 to capture dietary assessment in the NDNS. Gillian has long experience of dietary survey and nutrition composition work in government, working for ten years for the Food Standards Agency, previously for the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, more recently for Department of Health and, from 2013 for its executive agency Public Health England, before transferring to OHID.
Dr Fiona Comrie
Dr Fiona Comrie is a Registered Nutritionist (Public Health), and a senior Public Health Nutrition Advisor in the Nutrition Science and Policy Branch at FSS. Fiona studied Health Sciences and Nutrition at the University of Aberdeen and was awarded an MRC studentship for a study of automated 24-hour dietary recall in undergraduate students, for which she was awarded a PhD in 2008. She has worked in government, in diet and nutrition, since graduating. Fiona’s areas of expertise are in measuring diets and providing advice to help people make healthier food and drink choices.