Jake Sallaway-Costello
Associate Professor in Health Promotion, Faculty of Science
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Biography
Jake Sallaway-Costello is an Associate Professor in Health Promotion, in the Division of Food, Nutrition & Dietetics. His academic expertise concerns social and behavioural constructions of the diet, and their use in the development of health promotion interventions. An interdisciplinary social scientist, Jake's teaching and research is informed by perspectives from health psychology, health sociology, and public health.
Jake's career in public health emerged from a research assistantship at Food Dudes Health, whilst studying health psychology at Bangor University. As a graduate, he worked in the development of behaviour change programmes at the Centre for Activity and Eating Research in Wales, focused on increasing child fruit and vegetable consumption. Jake later worked as a research associate for the North Wales Economic Ambition Board, before commencing an academic career as a lecturer at Birmingham City University. He joined the University of Nottingham as an Assistant Professor in 2019, and became an Associate Professor in 2024. Jake is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and maintains a diverse body of pedagogic scholarship, particularly focused on theory-to-practice teaching for health promotion, and decolonisation of public health.
Beyond teaching, Jake is an innovative public health professional, developing community-level health promotion work in the UK, and planetary health policy initiatives internationally. Jake serves as a founding Co-director of a large social enterprise in the West Midlands, an asset-based community nutrition programme which has produced over 1.45 million meals using food destined for waste.
Teaching Summary
Jake teaches social scientific perspectives on food, nutrition, and health, for development of health promotion practice and intervention. He teaches on various modules across the BSc Nutrition and… read more
Research Summary
Jake has a PhD in Public Health from Birmingham City University, under the supervision of Kate Thomson and Anne Robbins. His thesis, "Community, culture and meat consumption: A traditional… read more
Jake teaches social scientific perspectives on food, nutrition, and health, for development of health promotion practice and intervention. He teaches on various modules across the BSc Nutrition and MNutr Nutrition & Dietetics programs. Jake also supervises doctoral candidates studying for PhD Nutritional Science.
In undergraduate teaching, Jake is Module Convenor for BIOS2113 - Food and Society, a second-year module exploring the social construction of the diet, the role of nutrition professionals in society, and appraisal of social food movements in creating health. He is also Module Convenor for BIOS3043 - Changing Behaviour, Promoting Health, a third-year module concerning the psychosocial origins of dietary behaviour, and their application to public health nutrition through health promotion intervention. Beyond teaching public health, Jake is Module Convenor of BIOS1029 - Essential Study Skills, a first-year module taken across the School of Biosciences to equip new students with academic competencies to support their scientific careers, and the BIOS4096 - Postgraduate Research Project for MSc Nutritional Sciences and MSc Clinical Nutrition students.
Jake also teaches on the following modules:
- BIOS2072 - Professional Skills for Nutritionists
- BIOS3019 - Research Skills in Dietetics
- BIOS4065 - Research Skills in Nutrition
- BIOS4070 - Public Health Nutrition
Jake is a keen pedagogist and is active in the scholarship of learning and teaching, particularly in the teaching of social science and public health for the allied health professions. His pedagogic interests include the development of authentic assessments, including intervention design and ethnographic tasks, and emancipatory pedagogies which prepare students to practice in the new arenas of public health. Recently, Jake has led student partnership projects to develop community-based learning exercises, and initiate a new body of work on "queering nutrition" to empower LGBTQ+ nutrition and dietetics students to champion inclusive practice.
Jake supervises qualitative student research projects on the BSc Nutrition and MNutr Nutrition & Dietetics courses, using interview, focus group, participant observation and videography methods of social scientific research on health.
Current Research
Jake has a PhD in Public Health from Birmingham City University, under the supervision of Kate Thomson and Anne Robbins. His thesis, "Community, culture and meat consumption: A traditional ethnography of meat and the new materialisms for planetary health" was an ethnographic investigation of the sociocultural meanings of meat in the Western-pattern diet, employing New Materialist Social Inquiry to explore reduced meat consumption and sustainable diets, for health promotion practice.
An ethnographer, Jake's methodological interests concern the investigation of health cultures and health activism through naturalist participatory methods, particularly through participant-researcher relationships facilitated by social enterprise and community development work. Jake is a qualitative and post-qualitative methodologist with broad interests in analytical processes valuing the material nature of health and wellbeing, and the use of social theory to develop post-human analytical tools.
Jake is actively engaged in the critique and development of social theory for health promotion, focused on the use of salutogenesis to design planetary health policy and community development practice. Current and ongoing research in this area concerns the use of salutogenic theory to support local-level navigation of national-level planetary health infrastructure development, the use of salutogenesis as an early-career practice lens for health promoters in the third sector, and theorising the Sense for Coherence to support nutrition professionals to aid social food movements.