Dr. Jess Haines
University of Guelph
Dr. Haines is an associate professor in the department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition (FRAN). Her primary research interest is in the prevention of weight-related disorders among children and adolescents. Within this concentration, her current research is focused on community and family-based interventions aimed at promoting healthful behaviours among preschool children.
She has developed a program called Parents and Tots Together, which is a family-based intervention that embeds strategies to improve children’s weight-related behaviours within an existing general skills parenting program. Dr. Haines is the Principal Investigator of a current study, funded by the Danone Institute, to test the effectiveness of Parents and Tots Together among families recruited through Ontario Early Years Centres. She is also the Associate Director of the Guelph Family Health Study, a family-based cohort study designed to identify early life risk factors of obesity and chronic disease and to test family-based strategies to support healthful behaviours early in life. Additionally, she is a Co-Investigator of an NIH-funded study to examine how the general family environment influences adolescent weight and weight-related behaviours among participants in the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS). GUTS is a prospective cohort of over 16,000 adolescents who are the offspring of participants in the Nurses’ Health Study II.