Professor Geraldine McNeill

Geraldine McNeill BA MB ChB MSc PhD RNutr (Public Health) FAFN is Visiting Professor of Global Nutrition and Health at the University of Edinburgh. Her interest in nutrition was sparked when she was an undergraduate medical student at the University of Cambridge where her dissertation was supervised at the Dunn Nutrition Laboratory. Following this Geraldine spent a year as a volunteer with Save the Children Fund in Burkina Faso, which brought home to her the linkages between agriculture, nutrition and health in resource-poor settings. After completing her medical training she returned to nutrition through postgraduate study at the London School of  Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, carrying out her PhD research in rural S India.

Geraldine spent much of her academic career in Aberdeen, initially at the Rowett Research Institute where she led the establishment of a residential human nutrition unit and whole body calorimetry facilities and carried out studies of body composition, energy intake and expenditure, and later at the University Medical School where she held appointments in research and teaching in Public Health Nutrition. She led a Public Health Nutrition research group of 20 post-doctoral scientists and PhD students and carried out longitudinal studies of diet and health outcomes including asthma, cardiovascular disease, cancer and cognitive decline as well as large-scale surveys of children’s diet in Scotland.

Since 2017 she has enjoyed a new role at the Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security at the University of Edinburgh which allows her to continue research, teaching and mentoring in a multidisciplinary academic environment.

Geraldine is a Trustee of the Association for Nutrition and was Registrar of the Association from 2015-19.