Dr. E. Leigh Gibson, University of Roehampton would welcome more collaboration with RSU

Dr. Leigh Gibson is Reader in Biopsychology and Director of the Clinical and Health Psychology Research Centre within the Department of Psychology at the University of Roehampton, UK. His current research is concerned with influences on appetite and food choice, and their interaction with stress, health, and cognitive and emotional well-being. He also acts as an expert consultant for the food and drink industry in the UK. In September, Dr. Gibson visited Rīga Stradiņš University as guest lecturer at the Department of Sports and Nutrition at the RSU Faculty of Public Health and Social Welfare. His lectures were titled "Drivers and barriers in children’s eating and drinking" and "Cognitive deficits associated with obesity and diabetes: is poor gluco-regulation responsible?".

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Assoc. Prof. Leigh Gibson with head of professional Bachelor's study programme "Nutrition" and academic Master's study programme "Nutrition Science" Lolita Neimane and lecturer Māra Grundmane at the Rīga conference "Rehabilitation and Nutrition".

How did you originally start collaborating with Rīga Stradiņš University?

I was firstly invited to present at a Nutrition and Health conference at RSU in 2012 (the first in Rīga). The connection had already been made because we had an undergraduate student on the Erasmus+ programme who I was supervising. Afterwards I kept in contact when she was doing her Master’s degree back here at RSU;  I was her supervisor. Based on that connection, RSU invited me to present at this conference. The following year I was invited to teach at RSU – guest lectures to a mixture of Master's and undergraduate students.

How do you find the response from the students at lectures? Are they attentive, questioning?

Yes it's always been very positive, the students have had intelligent questions which is always very satisfying.

Have you been involved in supervising other Master’s research at RSU?

I'd be very happy to consider more of that and consider some research collaboration.

The study programme Nutrition at Rīga Stradiņš University is celebrating 15 years this year. You have also witnessed how the department as a whole has developed over the past years – have you noticed changes in the work of the department?

I was lucky to be at the opening ceremony of the new Medical Education Technology Centre building in 2013, with new training facilities. These are very impressive and the nutritionists had a research kitchen built, with cooking facilities for their programme and useful labs surrounding it. It’s different from the setup at Roehampton, because it’s in a clinical setting here and within Rehabilitation.  Clinical nutrition is organised somewhat differently here than it is in the UK, where you won’t find departments or centres of rehabilitation, rather you’ll find individual units with physiotherapy, occupational therapy, dietitians and other specialists within the hospital environment – called Aftercare – but not organised in such an obvious way within Rehabilitation.

It just seems a different approach to structuring it.

I guess – the RSU approach seems quite sensible, and it emphasises the importance to patient outcomes of focusing rehabilitation in a coordinated way.

The staff cohort is increasing in size as well, which means they can take on more students. I think it’s still relatively small in terms of student numbers. There’s seems to be room to expand the student numbers in terms of facilities. And you’re also getting quite a lot of overseas students in the post-graduate courses as well, which are taught in English.

Presumably, you are not the only academic who marries Psychology with Nutrition?

There's a small group of people called The British Feeding and Drinking Group (becoming increasingly international), an interdisciplinary group of scientists, mainly psychologists, with an interest in eating behaviours, disorders and obesity. There are some nutritionists involved in it as well.  They hold an annual conference for 100-150 delegates.

Is there also much work being done in this area in the United States?

There's more in the USA, actually. For example, the journal Physiology & Behavior – many papers there have some relationship to nutrition-related topics. But if you look at the obesity conferences both in the USA and in Europe, they tend to be dominated by the medical profession – endocrinologists, physicians, bariatric surgery specialists.  Not too many psychologists or nutritionists.  There are also meetings organised by the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior, though it is dominated by animal model science.

That's treating the extreme cases – ­are you more into prevention rather than treatment?

I’m certainly interested in public health and also understanding how interventions might work better if you take into account the knowledge of appetite control, food choice behaviour, and the influence of the environment, including families, on peoples’ eating.

Do you have an idea of what’s going to happen after Brexit – with regard to collaborations with universities still in the EU?

Nobody knows what’s going to happen, but probably what’s going to be the case for businesses is that they’re going to have to find their way around the problems that the politicians are creating, and work together, and I hope that scientists will also work together across nations.

With regard to collaborations with Rīga Stradiņš University, I can have more dialogue with the academics at RSU on how to find some joint funding for research, whether there are some opportunities from a Latvian government outreach funding system or something like that  – encouraging international collaborations would be useful. And vice-versa – I can try to see if there’s an equivalent source in the UK or from European funding.