Emma Patterson

• Adjunct lectorer in Public Health Nutrition - nutritionist with a focus on 
• the importance of diet for public health and for a sustainable society.
• Employed at the Swedish Food Agency in Uppsala (www.livsmedelsverket.se) where I work on national dietary surveys and evaluating the evidence for questions related to public health nutrition and sustainable diets. I also act as a contact point between Sweden and EFSA (European Food Safety Authority).
• Trained initially as a dietitian and nutritionist in Ireland, and completed a doctorate in medical sciences in 2010 at KI on the topic of child and adolescent dietary habits, followed by postgraduate training in nutritional epidemiology and public health sciences.
• Worked for many years with evaluating school meal quality nationally.
• European Nutrition Leadership Program (2010) alumnus.
• National and interational reviewing and examination assignments.

I study how to measure and assess dietary habits and how they relate to health (nutritional epidemiology), and how to influence them in practice, with a focus on evaluation, intervention and implementation. I have a special interest in children's diets, school meals, sustainable diets and reducing inequalities in health. At the Swedish Food Agency I evaluate the evidence related to various hot topics related to diet and health, such as ultraprocessed food, or replacement meat products.

Prior to this I helped to develop, validate and subsequently implement an innovative system for evaluating school meals (SkolmatSverige). It has been used by almost half of the country's primary schools to some degree, and we have shown that it can have a significant effect on quality, preferably in combination with policy. I worked for many years at the Centre for Epidemiology and Social Medicine at the Region of Stockholm on health-promoting schools and issues related to nutrition and evaluation in the region. I co-developed and oversaw the implementation of an instrument, School Food Sweden, to measure school food and meal quality nationally.

I am also involved in the Mistra-funded Sustainable Consumption project, co-ordinated by KTH where I have performed a health impact assessment showing how a small number of more sustainable dietary practices could result in significantly fewer premature deaths in Sweden. This work was carried out with collaborators from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. More recently, as part of a large collaboration, I have estimated the health impact that different tax scenarios could lead to (ongoing).

In the project "OPTIMAT: Fostering healthy and sustainable dietary habits through optimised school meals [2]", with funding from Formas, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainability, I and colleagues looked at ways to enhance school meals with respect to nutrition, climate impact, cost and acceptability, simultaneously. We conducted simulations and successful real-world interventions in schools. The project showed promising results, and is being replicated elsewhere.

A Healthy School Start is a parental support programme that targets all children starting school (ages 5-7) with the aim of developing healthy habits and preventing overweight. It is now available for implementation, after repeated evaluations showed promising results regarding dietary behaviours and in children with obesity, reducing the level of overweight. I helped to develop and validate a mobile-phone based method for measuring dietary intakes during the evaluation and analysed pooled results. Strategies for full-scale *implementation* of the A Healthy School Start programme are the focus of a study ("IMPROVE") with funding from Forte.

Bibliometry and research assessment
Author of >

• Docent in Public Health Sciences (2022). Adjunct senior lecturer in Public Health Nutrition (2021).
• Co-supervisor for two doctoral students, successfully defended.
• Mentor for KIs first FIELD (Fellows in Fellows in Equal Career Development) programme (2022-2023).
• Main supervisor for eight final year student projects within basic and advanced programmes Nutrition, Food Science, Public Health and Global Health.
• Lecturer on the basic and advanced programmes Public Health, Nutrition, Physiotherapy and Health Science, Medicine, on courses Applied Epidemiology, Nutrition Epidemiology and Health Promotion. I lecture mainly on the topics of nutritional epidemiology, public health nutrition and dietary assessment methods, in both English and Swedish.
• Member of PhD examination committees nationally and internationally.
• Experienced at giviing popular science lectures, interviews and other presentations for non-scientific audiences.