Rate My Professor Liza Barbour

Dr Liza Barbour is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food within Monash University’s Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences. She completed her PhD in Public Health Nutrition at Monash University in 2023, with a thesis titled “Protecting our planet and our population: the policy response of local governments to facilitate the uptake of healthy and sustainable diet-related practices.” An Advanced Accredited Practising Dietitian, Liza has over a decade of practical experience in community and clinical dietetics, food service, and public health nutrition in the Pilbara and Gascoyne regions of remote Western Australia, Alice Springs, the Kingdom of Tonga, and metropolitan Melbourne. She began teaching at Monash University in 2010 and, in collaboration with Dr Julia McCartan, designed and continues to coordinate one of Australia’s first undergraduate units on food sustainability systems for nutrition and dietetics students. Liza teaches Public Health Nutrition and Food Sustainability Systems to nutrition science and dietetics students and currently holds a Faculty Education Fellowship (2022-2024) leading an interdisciplinary project to co-design planetary health curriculum with educators and students from various health professions.

Liza’s research interests include planetary health, sustainable food systems, education research, social justice, capacity building, environmental sustainability in healthcare, sustainable development, sustainable consumption, and sustainable cities. Her PhD examined the role of local government policy in promoting population-wide shifts to healthy and environmentally sustainable diets. She serves as an active member of Dietitians Australia’s Food and Environment leadership committee, leading the development of their first National position paper on Healthy and Sustainable Diets, and as an Australian Advisor on the International Confederation of Dietetic Associations’ sustainable food systems toolkit. Liza has earned major teaching awards, including the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Education (Teaching Excellence) in 2019, the SCS Teaching Excellence Award in the category of Innovation in Learning in 2023, the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2019, the Vice-Chancellor’s Excellence Award for Community Education Programs in 2023, and the NHMRC Post-Graduate Scholarship in 2019. Key publications include “Equipping our public health nutrition workforce to promote planetary health - a case example of tertiary education co-designed with students” (Public Health Nutrition, 2025), “Responding to urgent calls for fit-for-purpose planetary health curricula: an examination of nutrition and dietetics tertiary education” (International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 2025), “Inclusion of planetary health in developmental biology education” (Developmental Biology, 2025), and “Embodying the planetary health education framework in our teaching: Evaluating students’ engagement with co-designed international infectious diseases curriculum” (Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 2025).