Greta Defeyter
Greta is the Director of the Healthy Living Lab at Northumbria University. Her current research interests are food insecurity, social and educational injustice and holiday hunger. She has received funding from multiple sources and has published over 100 papers on school breakfast clubs, food insecurity, and holiday activities and food. She is now a recognised expert in this area and in 2015, she was made a Fellow of the British Psychological Society in recognition of her research with ‘hard to reach’ populations.
More recently, she joined a prestigious line up of award winners by winning a Food Heroes Award from Sustain for her research and evaluations on school breakfast clubs and holiday hunger. In 2017, the Healthy Living Lab won the British Psychology Public Engagement Award (North East) for their translational research on feeding disadvantaged children. In 2020 she was recognised, by the Big Issue, as one of the top 100 changemakers for her research and policy impact on food poverty.
She has also conducted research on children’s engagement in physical activity (in and out of school), and recently she has led the co-design of the HAF programme; followed by a youth led co-design project that engaged young people in co-designing a specific HAF programme to meet the evolving needs of young people. Greta is currently working with the School Meals Coalition and the World Food Programme. A sample of her publications and films showing her work of engaging young people in co-design can be found at: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/takeontomorrow/it-is-time/holiday-activity-and-food-programmes