Adjunct in the Department of Surgery on the academic staff of the Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University.

Department of Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, CanadaDuties: leading a systematic review of studies assessing environmental impacts of surgical and anaesthetic care provision, with focus on the carbon footprint of surgical suite operation, individual surgical procedures, and equipment and pharmaceuticals used in surgical settings. This review was the first project to fall under the Healthy Populations Institute’s new flagship research area: Creating Sustainable Health Systems in a Climate Crisis, which brings together researchers from health and environmental sciences to support a transition toward more environmentally sustainable health systems. This work has since been published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, CanadaDuties: As part of a project that aims to synthesise life cycle assessment (LCA) research so as to support more robust aggregations of food system environmental impacts, I was tasked with helping to populate a purpose-built database with extant food LCA studies, particularly those focussing on the major animal protein groups. During the period of employment, I reviewed and extracted key data from more than 150 life cycle assessment studies. A state-of-the-science review is currently being prepared, which will introduce the database to the academic community and discuss current LCA coverage of food items around the world.

Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Dunedin School of Medicine.Duties: This work involved the development of graphical models for inclusion within a Cancer Society of New Zealand grant application. More specifically, visual summaries of the Cancer Society Research Collaboration’s (CSRC) research processes and priorities were designed to accompany the application’s main text. This grant application was successful and valued at $2m.

Duties: Following discussions with Ministry of Health officials relating to progress on my Honour’s thesis, I was commissioned over a five-month period to write a report on sustainable dietary guidelines in the NZ context, which could be incorporated into the current Eating and Activity Guidelines series in the form of an ‘issues-based document’. More specifically the report provided relevant background on the topic of climate-friendly food choices, alongside key findings and recommendations for New Zealanders based on results from my research.