Jerusa Brignardello

A trained dietitian from the University of Valparaiso, Chile, Jerusa is very enthusiastic about bridging the gap between nutritional systems biology and health policy-making. After her first degree and an MSc in Nutrition and Food from the Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology (INTA) at the University of Chile, she devoted her time to working as a research coordinator of nutrition-based clinical trials at INTA and as a lecturer of Human Nutrition at the University of Desarrollo, Chile for over five years. She also worked as an International Consultant at the World Food Programme of the United Nations in Panama where her main role was to design nutritional strategies and food products to tackle the double burden of malnutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean. She worked for Nutrigenomix, a University of Toronto start-up biotechnology company dedicated to providing nutritional genomic information and personalised nutrition to healthcare professionals. Jerusa is currently in the last year of her doctoral program at Imperial College London, where she is investigating the effects of different dietary patterns on metabolism using state-of-the-art metabolic phenotyping techniques. She hopes to contribute solutions to some of the problems of public health nutrition by including “omics” approaches to nutrition research and how scientific evidence on diet is translated into policy and practice, by government, industry, the public health community and the media to improve the health of individuals and populations.

• Faculty of Medicine