Georgie Russell

Child Eating, Appetite Self-Regulation and Parental Feeding

A central focus of my research is understanding how children's eating behaviours develop, to understand how and why some children develop in ways that make healthy eating easier than for others. I am particularly interested in the role of appetite self-regulation: the capacity to regulate food intake in response to hunger, fullness cues and external cues, which develops across childhood and plays a critical role in shaping dietary patterns and long-term health. My work in this area spans theory development, measurement, and empirical research. I have developed three influential biopsychosocial models that explain how biological, psychological, and environmental factors interact to shape children's eating, frameworks that have been adopted by research groups nationally and internationally. A current focus on understanding child appetite self-regulation in middle-childhood. I lead the Children's Eating and Weight Study (CHEWS), a large-scale citizen science project conducted in partnership with Museums Victoria (Scienceworks) since 2019, which has engaged more than 5,000 children and families in scientific research on child appetite self-regulation in middle childhood.

Food Packaging, Marketing and Food Environments

A second program of my research examines how food environments, particularly food packaging design and marketing, shape what children, families and the broader community choose to eat. Despite the importance of packaging as a point of influence on food choice, its design features have been poorly understood from a nutrition science perspective. My research addresses this gap by bringing together nutrition science, visual communication design, artificial intelligence, and marketing in a multidisciplinary program. A current focus is the PackAIging Project, which is developing AI-enabled methods to analyse food packaging features at scale. This work that has the potential to transform how researchers and regulators monitor the packaged food supply. This program has attracted a Science and Society Interdisciplinary Research Grant (2024) and contributes to evidence informing food labelling policy and regulation in Australia and internationally.

Methods, Measurement and Conceptual Foundations

Underpinning both programs is a sustained commitment to advancing the methodological and conceptual rigour of behavioural nutrition research. Reliable, theoretically grounded measurement tools are prerequisite to meaningful progress in understanding eating behaviour. Developing them has been a key feature of my research program. I have led the development and validation of measures assessing eating behaviours, appetitive traits, food texture preferences and food choice processes in children, several of which are now widely used in the field. I have also contributed new conceptual frameworks for thinking about how eating behaviours should be defined, measured, conceptualised and studied. This work advances research quality in behavioural nutrition internationally.