Caring Futures Institute - Better Lives

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Dr Brittany Johnson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Caring Futures Institute, College of Nursing and Health Sciences. She is an Accredited Practicing Dietitian with a background in public health nutrition and experience in working with Aboriginal communities and the child care sector to make healthy food choices.

She obtained a PhD in Public Health (Flinders University, conferred 2020) which identified intervention content to support parents to reduce provision of unhealthy foods to their young children, during the transition to pre-school and school.

Brittany's research focusses on improving children and families’ health behaviours, including diet quality by reducing unhealthy food intake. She has expertise in applying behaviour change theory and creating supportive environments where children and families live, work,learn and play. This includes a research focus on building the evidence for school-provided meals in Australian schools.

She leads the deconstructing interventions component of the TOPCHILD Collaboration funded by an NHMRC Ideas Grant (2020-23). The TOPCHILD Collaboration is an international project is bringing together researchers from over 20 countries to transform early childhood obesity prevention, by exploring past, ongoing and planned interventions to understand how they work, and for whom. Brittany is part of the NHMRC EPOCH-Translate Centre for Research Excellence, Translating Early Prevention of Obesity in Childhood (https://earlychildhoodobesity.com/)

Transforming Obesity Prevention for CHILDren (TOPCHILD) Collaboration

Brittany leads the deconstructing interventions component of the TOPCHILD Collaboration. The TOPCHILD Collaboration is bringing together researchers from around the world to transform the thinking and practices around early childhood obesity prevention. It will be a world-first to combine individual participant data meta-analysis, deconstructing interventions and predictive modelling to identify key effective components of very early obesity prevention interventions (i.e. starting <12 months of age). By unpacking past interventions, we will understand how they work, and for whom. From this project researchers will be able to use the effective components to design new interventions that are efficient, implementable, and scalable, and directly inform policy and practice.

To find out more visit: www.topchildcollaboration.org or contact topchild.study@sydney.edu.au

• Children and families
• Unhealthy food intake
• Behaviour change
• School food
• Intervention design

Brittany has expertise in systematic reviews, behaviour change theory, intervention design, secondary analyses of national data sets, structural equation modelling, discrete choice experiments and dietary modelling analyses. 

Prizes and Awards

Flinders University Vice-Chancellor's Award for Early Career Researchers (2021)

College of Nursing and Health Sciences Vice President & Executive Dean's Early Career Researcher Award (2021)

Best Higher Degree by Research Student Publication Award (2019)

Flinders University Research Student Travel Grant (2019)

Healthy Development Adelaide Research Travel Grant (2019)

Best Student Abstract (Children and Families Special Interest Group), ISBNPA Annual Meeting 2019 (2019)

Flinders University Research Scholarship (2018-19) 

Flinders University Top-up Scholarship (2018-19)

King and Amy O'Malley Trust Home Economics Postgraduate Scholarship (2017-19)

Australian Commonwealth Research Training Program Scholarship (2016-17)

The Co-op High Achiever Research Grant (2017)