Candida Hunt is one of the founding voices behind HENRY. A parenting educator, training consultant and behaviour change specialist, Candida played a key role in shaping the charity’s approach and led the organisation as Director until her retirement in 2012.

Throughout her career, Candida has been deeply committed to supporting families and those who work with them. She co-founded the parenting charity Family Links, developed the Families for Health programme at Warwick University, and created HENRY’s training courses that continue to make a difference today. 

Candida is also the author of The Parenting Puzzle – How to Get the Best out of Family Life (Family Links, 2003) and Healthy Families, and co-author of Tackling Child Obesity with HENRY (HENRY, 2017), the foundation of our best practice handbook A Healthy Start (HENRY, 2014). Her vision and leadership remain at the heart of HENRY’s work.

Mary Rudolf is one of the founders of HENRY and continues to support the charity as our academic adviser. A leading voice in childhood obesity prevention, Mary worked for many years as a consultant paediatrician and professor of child health in Leeds before moving to Israel, where she is now Professor of Population Health at Bar-Ilan University.

Mary has dedicated her career to improving child health outcomes, with a particular focus on the prevention, treatment and epidemiology of childhood obesity. She was among the first to raise the alarm on the obesity epidemic in 2001 and led the Growth and Nutrition team at Leeds University for over two decades. Her Department of Health-commissioned publication Tackling obesity through the healthy child programme: a framework for action forms the evidence base that underpins the HENRY approach. In 2017, she co-authored A Healthy Start with Kim Roberts, a best practice handbook for health and early years practitioners.