 My name is Associate Professor Claire Wall. I'm head of the discipline of nutrition and dietetics in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. Our current areas of research in the discipline of nutrition and dietetics cover early life nutrition, clinical nutrition and dietetics, nutrigenomics and some areas of antioxidant research and health. We have the expertise and research capability to measure dietary intake, to measure growth and development and also to measure nutritional status by using various biomarkers. We run clinical trials to look at the effectiveness of various components of the diet or whole diets by using an intervention or a placebo. Optimal nutrition is vitally important in early life. It's really important for health, growth and development. In early infancy we know fatically that breast milk is the optimal nutrition source for infants. But interestingly we don't know a great deal about the nutrition and dietary intake of older infants aged between 12 and 24 months. The second year of life is a really informative time in terms of the development of food habits. Older infants are starting to transition onto the family diet and so this is a time when new tastes develop, toddlers become used to the family diet and also they develop habits that can form lifetime behaviors around specific foods. So it's really imperative that we understand more about this period so that we can assist parents with regards to optimising their children's dietary intakes early in life. Currently we are undertaking a study to explore in-depth nutrition in toddlers and only level our PhD student is conducting this research. I'm looking at a growth and development study where we have toddlers from the age of 12 months and are able to follow them through to the age of 24 months using a variety of measures. We're looking at physical development through weight, length and waist circumference. We're also looking at body composition using a variety of techniques such as bioelectrical impedance to look at lean muscle mass and also dexa scans. We're using dexa scans to look more in-depth at the proportions of lean mass and fat mass. We're also able to measure dietary intake by asking parents what their children have had to eat through food frequency questionnaires looking at intake over the last month and also using questions throughout periods of the study at different time points looking at what the children have eaten in the last 24 hours. From this we were able to look at nutritional status. Here we take blood tests and look at different micronutrient levels such as iron and vitamin D. We're able to measure cognitive development and outcomes using internationally recognised methods that look at cognitive development, problem solving, motor movement, communication through a series of play activities with the toddlers at the beginning and end of the study. Much of the nutrition research that is conducted in the discipline of nutrition and dietetics is really able to inform evidence based practice and policy to improve the health status of the New Zealand population.