Tebby Leepile

Tebogo Leepile, or ‘Tebby’, a Botswana native, is a final year PhD candidate in Integrated Studies in Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She is supervised by Drs Eduardo Jovel and Crystal Karakochuk. Her work broadly focuses on understanding and leveraging the intersections between food environments and the social determinants of health in alleviating food and nutrition health vulnerabilities among the marginalized, less privileged, and underserved, especially women and children. She is particularly interested in public policy issues and implementation science to inform and guide respectful, inclusive, responsive, and impactful research and actions to better people’s lives. As a Public Scholar and graduate trainee at the UBC Social Exposome Cluster (SEC), Tebby has established herself as a committed and engaged leader at her institution and beyond. Most notably, she co-founded the Liu Institute Network for Africa (LINA), a graduate-student-led initiative that serves as a focal point for robust transdisciplinary research, discussions, and policy actions on Africa’s governance and development issues. Her research efforts are supported, among others, by the Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST), International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and UBC SEC ‘Society to Cell’ Clyde Hertzman Memorial Fellowship.