Monica Mars

I am an associate professor at the division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. I am a nutrition scientist by training, I did my Master as well as my PhD at Wageningen University. My research investigates the relation between food properties and food intake, in order to support evidence based guidelines for weight management. Eventually, my mission is to help people to improve their eating behaviour so to increase their quality of life. The BigO projects uses a novel approach to tackle this problem, that is the use of citizen science and BigData to better understand the foodscapes of children. I strongly believe that this new approach can help us to bring the field of eating behaviour forward. In the BigO project one of our roles is to coordinate Work Package 8, the dissemination work package. Together with the other consortium partners we make sure that our project is disseminated to different audiences, the user community, that is the children, teachers, clinicians and public health professionals, the scientific community, and the general public. We do this by use of social media, newsletters, the website, but also by putting our work on the program of scientific meetings. In addition, I work together with high schools children to discuss their opinion on our project and thereby get a feel on how to approach certain issues. And last, one of our tasks is to evaluate the data that is collected with the platform and relate this to the etiology of obesity.