Research Assistant – Dietary Assessment

Dietary Assessment, Nutrition Measurement Platform

Left the Unit in 2023

Current work and interests

Kirsty joined the unit in October 2018 as a Research Assistant – Dietary Assessment with the Nutrition Measurement Platform.  She assisted in the development of a new automated tool (Intake24) for capturing dietary intake to assess the diet of the UK population using a standardised approach for the reviewing and rationalisation of the food codes in the food composition database, adapting Intake 24 to appropriately represent the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS).  Kirsty also provides support, working in conjunction with Public Health England, to ensure that the food composition database is maintained and kept up to date.

Part of Kirsty’s role also involved working closely with the interviewers, providing feedback on the quality of the four day diet diaries received, to enable us to obtain better quality data, including face to face interviewer briefings.

Kirsty left the Unit in April 2023.

Background and experience

Prior to joining the Unit Kirsty completed a BSc(Hons) in Nutrition and Human Health in 2009 and shortly after completing her degree started working at MRC-Elsie Widdowson Laboratory.  Kirsty firstly started as a dietary Assessment Assistant; working on a few different studies; enabling her to obtain a vast knowledge of dietary coding practices and styles, then she was promoted to the NDNS Research Assistant at the beginning of 2014.  She has a passion for food and nutrition and this is reaffirmed by her current role and her previous career as a chef, which has become very useful over the years working on the NDNS and other dietary assessment studies.