Professor Michelle Morris

Profile

I’m an interdisciplinary researcher with a background spanning: health informatics, geography, nutritional epidemiology and health economics. My primary research interests are how new and emerging forms of data and data science methods can be best utilised to understand diet and lifestyle and their impacts on population health and planetary health. I am a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute at the British Library in London and the Academic Chair for the LIDA Data Science Development Programme.

Graduating with a neuroscience degree in 2002, I began a career in health informatics, working in a graduate position at EMIS health, one of the UK's leading healthcare clinical system providers, where I gained international project management experience. I returned to study for a MSc, equipping me in statistics and epidemiology training (2009) and completed an interdisciplinary PhD investigating 'Spatial analysis of dietary cost patterns and implications for health' (2013), followed by postdoctoral positions in both nutritional epidemiology and consumer data research. 

Currently, I lead the Nutrition and Lifestyle Analytics team at Leeds, focused on the use of new forms of 'big' and spatial data in health research, working closely with industry partners on food and activity data. I lead a programme of activity funded by the IGD (Institute of Grocery Distribution) to promote healthy and sustainable diets and am a Co-Director at the ESRC funded Consumer Data Research Centre in Leeds. I am the academic lead on the Priority Places for Food Index used in the Which? Affordable Food For All campaign.  

I am a co-investigator on two related UKRI Transforming UK Food System awards, FIO Food and DIO Food, leading data and evaluation work packages within these awards.

In 2023 my team was awarded the ESRC Outstanding Impact Prize in the Business and Enterprise category for our research in project: Enhancing retailer knowledge and building capacity using consumer data. 

Responsibilities

• Nutrition and Lifestyle Analytics team lead
• Academic Chair of the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics Data Science Development Programme
• School of Food Science and Nutrition Impact Champion

Research interests

My research interests centre around how we can make better use of available data, generated by activities of our daily living, to understand population food and lifestyle bahviours from a health, sustainability and food insecurity perspective.

The Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC)

ESRC Funded

The CDRC was established to lead academic engagement between industry and the social sciences, and utilise consumer data for academic research purposes.  We provide unique insight into a diverse range of societal and economic challenges, in collaboration with a wide range of consumer data providers. 

Data on food and lifestyles is important to my research and the CDRC provides a robust data service to support this research. I am the academic lead on the Priority Places for Food Index used in the Which? Affordable Food For All campaign.  

Food Insecurity in people living with Obesity: Improving sustainable and healthier food choices in the retail FOOD environment (FIO FOOD)

UKRI TUKFS Funded

The overall aim of the project is to provide actionable evidence for policy on retail strategies to address dietary inequalities in people living with obesity and food insecurity, to support sustainable and healthier food choices in the UK food system.  I lead Work package 2 – Population level – which utilises supermarket transaction and data science to understand the health and sustainability of population diet at scale.

Diet and Health Inequalities (DIO Food)

UKRI TUKFS Funded

The goal of the DIO Food project is to identify how we can provide timely evidence-based research and commentary from those facing diet and health inequalities. The main focus of the project is working with vulnerable groups (early years and people with low income) to tackle the cost of living crisis to give timely policy directives.

I lead Work Package 6 which investigates the impact ofthe high fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) legistaltion on sales of these products, across different retailers and population groups. Specifically, we are working with ASDA, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, who collectively represent 65%* of supermarket sales, to understand the impact of the HFSS legislation restricting location placement of HFSS products. 
*Kantar Worldpanel Grocery Market Share as of 17/04/24 

We will answer the following research questions:  

1. what happened to HFSS product sales after introduction of the policy?  
2. what happened to the retail product portfolios after introduction of the policy?  
3. Were impacts of the HFSS legislation equitable across different sociodemographic groups across the country?  
4. Has the HFSS legislation lead to healthier overall purchasing using Eatwell guide as metric? 

These questions will be answered using store level sales data, supplemented by contextual information collected interviews and surveys with the retailers and customers. 

Healthy and Sustainable diets programme eveluation

IGD Social Impact Funded

In collaboration with the IGD and their Nutrition Forum, representing retailers and manufacturers in the UK Food industry, we co-develop in store and online interventions and then acquire sales transaction data to independently evaluate the impact of these interventions on customer behaviour.

Scaling up place based food initiatives

https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/sustainability-research-institute/dir-record/research-projects/1888/scaling-up-place-based-food-initiatives

Qualifications

• BSc (hons) Neuroscience
• MSc Nutrition Obesity and Health
• PhD Spatial analysis of dietary cost patterns and implications for health

Professional memberships

• Association for Study of Obesity
• Society for Social Medicine

Current postgraduate researchers

• Muhammad Iqbal