Professor Geraldine McNeill

Biography

Geraldine's interest in Nutrition was aroused during higher education in Medicine and Physical Anthropology at the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham and a year spent as a volunteer with Save the Children Fund on a Mother and Child health and nutrition project in Burkina Faso, W. Africa. She undertook an MSc in Human Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine followed by a PhD project on socio-economic and seasonal patterns of energy intake and expenditure in adults in rural S. India. In 1986 she moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, to establish a Human Nutrition Unit at the Rowett Research Institute. Since then she has worked in nutrition research and training at the Rowett Institute and University of Aberdeen, focussing on dietary assessment and relationships between diet and health outcomes ranging from obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer and cognitive decline in adults and obesity, asthma and dental disease in children. She was lead for obesity in the Scottish School of Public Health Research, a 2-year collaboration between academics, practitioners and policy-makers.

Geraldine is author of over 125 peer-reviewed papers (Scopus H-index 37) and a number of peer-reviewed research reports. She was coordinator of the MSc Human Nutrition and Metabolism programme at the University of Aberdeen from 1991-2000 and has supervised or co-supervised 18 PhD theses to completion. From 2008-14 she led the Public Health Nutrition research group in the University of Aberdeen. She has been a member of research ethics committees, journal editorial boards, research grant funding panels and government advisory committees. In 2014 she took early retirement but continues to work part time as an Emeritus professor.

In 2015 Geraldine was elected to the Council of the Association for Nutrition (AfN) and currently chairs the AfN Registration Committee. She also advises the Scottish Centre for Social Research on dietary aspects of the Scottish Health Survey.