Professor Sheila Rodwell was one of the founding principal investigators in EPIC-Norfolk. She became interested in the relationship between diet and cancer whilst working on international comparative studies of fibre intake and colon cancer incidence in the UK and Scandinavia.

In the 1980s she worked on developing biomarkers that could be used to verify reported food intake in individuals. This made it possible to show that accurate measurement of diet in large numbers of individuals was feasible, making large scale prospective studies of cancer and diet possible.

Professor Sheila Rodwell sadly died on 15th June 2009. As well as being one of the principal investigators for the EPIC-Norfolk study she was Deputy Director of the Medical Research Council’s Dunn Human Nutrition Unit, an Associate Lecturer at the Institute of Public Health, University of Cambridge and visiting Professor at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.