Biography

Ben's current research focuses on the interplay between healthy and environmentally sustainable diet choices. Using modelling to simulate eating networks, he will investigage the possibility of behavioural spill-over resulting from interventions (e.g. constraints on meal choices) between discrete parts of a network.

Before joining The Rowett, Ben was a research fellow (contractor) at the Fogarty International Center (part of the NIH) in the US for 10 years, and was a consultant for other US institutes (Johns Hopkins, University of Virginia, Penn State). Ben was working on child growth and development in low- and middle-income settings, analysing longitudinal cohort data from an international consortium, MAL-ED. His recent research spans the aetiology and consequences of enteropathogen infection, biomarkers of environmental enteropathy, causes and recovery of growth deficits and patterns of cognitive development. Prior to this, he worked at SAC (now SRUC) modelling endemic livestock diseases. Ben trained as an ecologist and retains an interest in the factors that differentiate disease exposures and outcomes. Examining how research is turned into policy, with the Sabin Vaccine Institute, Ben has been looking at decision-support tools to better articulate the deliberative processes around vaccine introductions and use in low- and middle-income settings.