Professor Peter Scarborough

Professor of Population Health

Pete's research focusses are population approached to improve nutrition and the relationship between public health and environmental sustainability. His nutrition research focuses on influences of food choice, including food price, food labelling, marketing of foods and food accessibility.

Pete leads a research programme that develops scenario models to estimate the population-level health impact of changes in the prevalence of behavioural risk factors. This has lead to the development of the Preventable Risk Integrated ModEl (PRIME), which has been used in several published analyses of the role of diet in health including estimates of the impact of health-related food taxation in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand; achieving dietary recommendations in the UK and Canada; and incorporating the cost of greenhouse gas emissions into food prices in the UK.

Pete has published several articles on the development and validation of nutrient profile models (models that classify foods on the basis of their nutritional composition), and was involved in the development of the nutrient profile model used by Ofcom to regulate the broadcast advertising of foods to children in the UK.

Pete has worked for the BHF Centre on Population Approaches for NCD Prevention in various capacities since 2003. He received a DPhil in public health in 2009 for a thesis investigating geographic variations in coronary heart disease rates in England. Pete studied mathematics at undergraduate level.