Rate My Professor Jean Adams

University of Cambridge

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5.05/4/2026

Makes even dry topics interesting.

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About Jean

Professor Jean Adams holds the position of Professor of Dietary Public Health at the University of Cambridge's MRC Epidemiology Unit within the School of Clinical Medicine. She leads the Population Health Interventions programme. Adams trained in medicine at Newcastle University, earning a BMedSci (Hons) in Health Psychology and Psychiatry in 1998, an MBBS with distinction in 2001, and a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health in 2004. She further obtained an MSc in Health Psychology with distinction from City University London in 2007 and a PGCert in Science Communication with distinction from the University of the West of England in 2012. She is a Member of the Higher Education Academy since 2009.

Prior to joining the University of Cambridge in 2014, where she helped establish the Dietary Public Health group within the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR), Adams served as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Public Health at Newcastle University. Her early career was supported by an MRC Health of the Population fellowship and an NIHR Career Development Fellowship, both focused on influences on health behaviours and socio-economic inequalities therein. At Cambridge, she became Programme Leader in 2020 and Professor in 2022. Adams' research centres on population-level influences on diet and interventions to enhance dietary public health. This encompasses observational, evaluative, and theoretical work examining how social, fiscal, and physical environments shape eating behaviours and strategies to foster healthier diets. Key projects under her leadership include evaluations of the UK soft drinks industry levy, junk-free supermarket checkouts, mandatory calorie labelling in out-of-home settings, and restrictions on food marketing. She has secured substantial funding as principal investigator or co-investigator on grants from NIHR Public Health Research Programme, MRC, BBSRC, and others, such as £844,645 for calorie labelling assessment (2021-24) and £1,340,893 for takeaway outlet regulation evaluation (2020-23). Adams serves as academic director of the MPhil in Public Health since 2017 and inaugural academic director of the MPhil in Population Health Sciences from 2021. She is an academic editor for PLOS Medicine and deputy director of the Cambridge ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership. Notable publications include 'Searching and synthesising ‘grey literature’ and ‘grey information’ in public health: critical reflections on three case studies' (2016), 'Why are some population interventions for diet and obesity more equitable and effective than others? The role of individual agency' (2016), 'Frequency of eating home cooked meals and potential benefits for diet and health: cross-sectional analysis of a population-based cohort study' (2017), and 'Are school-based physical activity interventions effective and equitable? A meta-analysis of cluster randomized controlled trials with accelerometer-assessed activity' (2019).