Nandi Joubert (she/her) is a quantitative epidemiologist and registered Biokineticist. Her core interests are food environments, non-communicable diseases, cardiometabolic health, and the structural and intersecting social conditions that shape health equity.

Nandi joined the School of Public Health in August 2026 as a postdoctoral researcher in the Food Environments Research Group. She also serves as a clinical supervisor in the Department of Sport, Recreation and Exercise Science, guiding final-year biokinetics students at the Community and Health Sciences Wellness Centre.

Nandi’s research examines how the places where people live, learn, work and move influence their cardiometabolic health, and why this risk falls unevenly across communities. She completed her PhD in Epidemiology at the Swiss TPH and the University of Basel. Through long-standing South African-Swiss partnerships under the UNESCO Chair on Physical Activity and Health in Educational Settings, she has conducted cohort and cluster-randomised research in under-resourced communities. This work explored how social and structural conditions affect cardiometabolic risk, physical activity and access to prevention among children and teachers.

At SOPH, she brings this structural lens to food environments, investigating how they contribute to NCDs, the leading cause of death worldwide. She is particularly interested in how intersecting social positions determine who is most affected, and what this means for people’s broader capacity to live well. Her methods are mainly quantitative, including multilevel and Bayesian modelling in R, and the integration of clinical, physical activity, anthropometric and biomarker data.

Nandi is committed to equity across the whole research process, from who generates knowledge and whose voices shape it, to how research is designed and conducted. She translates her findings for academic, community, practitioner and policy audiences, so that evidence can support healthier and more equitable conditions for all.