Candida Hunt is one of HENRY’s co-founders. A parenting educator, training consultant and behaviour change specialist, Candida was Director of HENRY until her retirement in 2012. She was also a founding director of the parenting charity Family Links, and developed Warwick University’s Families for Health programme.

She is the author of The Parenting Puzzle – How to Get the Best out of Family Life (Family Links, 2003), co-author of Tackling Child Obesity with HENRY, the predecessor of A Healthy Start, a best practice handbook for health and early years practitioners (HENRY, 2017), and author of Healthy Families (HENRY, 2014). Candida developed HENRY’s training courses and led the organisation for six years before her retirement in 2012.

Mary worked in Leeds for many years as a consultant paediatrician and professor of child health before moving to Israel. She now works as professor of population health at Bar-Ilan university and continues to work closely with HENRY as our academic adviser. Her area of expertise lies in the epidemiology, treatment and prevention of child obesity. Mary is the author of Tackling obesity through the healthy child programme: a framework for action commissioned by the Department of Health, which provides the research and evidence base that underpins the HENRY approach.

Mary was among the first to publish on the advent of the obesity epidemic in 2001 and for over 20 years led the Growth and Nutrition team at Leeds University. Mary is published widely on the prevention, treatment and epidemiology of childhood obesity. In 2017, she co-authored, with Kim Roberts, A Healthy Start: a best practice handbook for health and early years practitioners.