Dr Steve Cummins is part of a successful project team which has been awarded a Medical Research Council grant for a project called MEAD (Measurement of Environment, Activity & Diet), in collaboration colleagues at Bristol, UEA, and Cardiff. The project will use GPS technology in large samples of children to objectively measure young people’s use of the environment and so overcome the fundamental methodological problem of self-report in large scale epidemiological studies. The project extends this methodology to investigate access to food outlets and aims to determine the relationship between characteristics of the environment (e.g. safety, green space, fast food outlets) in relation to location specific physical activity and dietary behaviours as well as obesity and stress in adolescents. Overall, the project is funded for 3 years at a cost of £770,000.