Doctor Sarah Kehoe

Sarah studied BSc Physiology and Psychology at the University of Southampton followed by a Masters in Public Health Nutrition during which she became particularly interested in global health issues. She joined the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit in 2006 as a Research Assistant working on a programme of research that investigated associations between early life nutrition exposures and later risk of cardiometabolic disease. This involved working extensively with research teams in rural and urban India on cohort studies and randomised controlled trials.

Sarah undertook her PhD part time alongside her role, which involved setting up and conducting a randomised controlled trial of a food-based intervention in Mumbai, India. Her thesis was entitled “The effect of a micronutrient-rich supplement on women’s health and nutrient status”.

Following her PhD, she continued to work in India and led a DFID-funded qualitative research project to study the determinants of fruit and vegetable consumption in rural Maharashtra and to better understand the challenges of food and nutrition security in these communities. This involved focus group discussions and interviews with women as consumers, farmers and food producers, wholesalers, market vendors and policy makers. Sarah contributed to a further qualitative research project with adolescents and their caregivers in South Asia and Africa to understand the barriers and facilitators to consuming a high-quality diet and being physically active. This project is ongoing with the aim of co-developing sustainable interventions with young people to reduce the double burden of under and overnutrition and prevent non-communicable disease.

In 2018 Sarah took on a Senior Research Fellow role with the NIHR funded Global Health Research Group: INPreP (Improved Nutrition Preconception, Pregnancy and Postpartum) which involved collaborating with teams in Burkina Faso, Ghana and South Africa on community engagement research activities as well as reviewing WHO and national level maternal and child nutrition policies. As part of this role Sarah was Training and Capacity Building Lead.

More recently, Sarah won a Faculty of Medicine Career Track fellowship to pursue a project led by Harvard School of Public Health in which she is analysing dietary data collected as part of a cohort study in India to validate a Global Diet Quality score among children.

Sarah has completed the Post graduate certificate of academic practice (PGCAP) and is Module Lead and Deputy Assessment Lead on the BM6 medicine course and teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate courses. She has supervised numerous MSc and BSc students as well as co-supervised PhD students in the UK and India. She is also an academic integrity officer and personal academic tutor for the Faculty of Medicine.

She has taught and facilitated on several training courses including an NIHR funded Qualitative Research and Community Engagement workshop and an MRC funded scientific writing course for early career researchers. She has designed training packages in anthropometry and dietary assessment for early career researchers and health professionals.

She is an Academic Editor for the journal Global Public Health and has co-led the organisation of several international conferences.