Nigel Unwin is a public health physician and epidemiologist whose research at the Centre largely concerns the relationships between food systems and the risk and prevention of non-communicable diseases.

His research interests include the distribution, determinants and prevention of diabetes and related non-communicable diseases (NCDs), both in the UK and in lower income settings outside the UK.

In the Intervention Co-creation for Food and Nutrition (ICoFaN) project, on which he is principal investigator, interventions to improve local food production and nutrition are being developed and evaluated in 2 countries in the Caribbean and 1 in the Pacific.

This work builds on the Community Food and Health Project (CFaH), now being written up, which developed a toolkit of methods to investigate the health, social and economic impacts of local food production initiatives in small island states.

He is a co-investigator on Caribbean Foodscapes and Transdisciplinary Data Assemblages, both of which bring interdisciplinary perspectives (from history, social science, and epidemiology) to investigate how food systems and the risk of NCDs have co-evolved.

Nigel is a fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health and of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He has contributed over many years to the work of World Health Organization’s diabetes group, including on the classification and diagnosis of diabetes, and to diabetes prevalence and mortality estimates of the International Diabetes Federation.

His reviewing activities have included membership of various funding panels at the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council, and he is currently a faculty member for the MRC Applied Global Health panel.

Along with his part time position at the Centre, he is also a part time research professor at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, where he is contributing to the development of their Global Diet and Activity Research (GDAR) network and programme.

He maintains a formal connection with UWI as honorary professor of Population Health Sciences at the George Alleyne Chronic Disease Research Centre.