Ms Eve House, PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney and EPOCH-Translate ECR, highlights the work of EPOCH-Translate members at the recent ISBNPA conference.

The International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity Conference was held in Tāmaki Makaurau – Auckland, Aotearoa – New Zealand from the 11^th to 14^th of June 2025 and was attended by delegates from around the world. This year’s conference theme was Manaaki Taiao, Manaaki Tāngata, Manaaki Meake Nei – Take care of the environment, take care of the people, take care of the future. The theme reflected the strong influence of Indigenous perspectives which were central to the conference and invited us to reflect on the ways that we conceptualise health and wellbeing and its intrinsic link to the world around us.

The conference featured an exciting program spanning the promotion of health behaviours during pregnancy and the early years through to healthy ageing; we heard about innovative research in implementation and systems science; and the conference maintained a strong focus on research impact. We had the opportunity to hear from four amazing keynote speakers and engage with an enormous breadth of research, with over 400 oral/short oral presentations, 370 posters, and almost 60 symposia.

The work of EPOCH-Translate members was on display throughout the four-day conference:

• Dr Brittany Johnson gave one of six invited ‘One to Watch’ presentations, where she shared reflections on her research journey and the different methods and frameworks she has used to make sense of the complexities of behaviour change in early childhood. Brittany also presented on findings of a project examining the Behaviour Change Techniques used in parent-focused behavioural programs, and shared two posters on outcomes of TOPCHILD, including the development of a decision-making dashboard to support research translation and another sharing the findings of the TOPCHILD systematic review and individual participant data meta-analysis.
  

  Dr Brittany Johnson, Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University

• Professor Kylie Hesketh presented the results of the Let’s Grow randomised controlled trial, which examined the effect of an app (Let’s Grow) to support parents with promoting healthy movement behaviours in young children.
• Associate Professor Rachel Laws shared a poster describing scale up of the INFANT program and its reach across Victoria and particularly amongst priority populations.
• Professor Rachael Taylor was part of a symposium exploring the relationship between digital media use and sleep.
• Dr Penny Love shared a poster, led by Dr Jessica Appleton, reporting on a comparative case study of the process of implementing and scaling up the INFANT and Healthy Beginnings early childhood health promotion programs
• Dr Konsita Kuswara was selected to present in an awards session and discussed qualitative research she has conducted, using systems thinking to identify opportunities for knowledge translation in early childhood obesity prevention. Konsita also shared the results of recent research examining opportunities to enable early childhood health promotion in Australian early childhood education and care settings.
• Ms Dimity Dutch shared two posters on behalf of the SCOPE team from University College Cork, focussed on their work developing Core Outcome Sets and Core Outcome Measures Sets for childhood health trials in early life. Dimity also presented an overview of her PhD thesis focussed on embedding health behaviour screening in primary healthcare settings.
• Ms Eve House presented the results of a scoping review examining parental experiences of primary health professional support with child growth and health behaviours in early childhood.

In addition, the conference brought together several members of the EPOCH-Connect organising committee – Dr Konsita Kuswara, Dimity Dutch, Abhigale D’Cruz, Cynthia Smith, Susan Paudel, and Eve House – and was a valuable opportunity to foster connections with other emerging researchers interested in child health promotion in the early years.

After four action-packed days, there were some clear ideas to take home and ponder: there is a need to reconceptualise our ideas of health and well-being and ensure this aligns with the priorities of the populations we work with, we must consider the complexities of the systems in which we promote behaviour change and the equity of the interventions we design, and above all design research for real-world impact.

Ms Dimity Dutch, Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Cork (Ireland)