Do you care about the lack of housing affordability in Australia? Does it matter to you that for the first time in human history more people are suffering from over-nutrition than under-nutrition? Should high school completion rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students be higher on the national agenda?

Five of the University of Sydney's academics and alumni have shared what matters most to them in the fifth month of our What Matters campaign. Now the University is calling on members of the public to cast their votes to find out what matters most to them.

Each month, five new 'Leading Lights' from the University of Sydney community talk about how their work has made a difference to the world.

Leading Lights for August include:

Professor Stephen Simpson, Academic Director, Charles Perkins Centre: Controlling our weight

"Now, for the first time in human history, more people on the planet are suffering the diseases of over-nutrition than are suffering the problems of under-nutrition. So it's estimated 1.6 billion people are either overweight or obese, with associated health consequences."

For Professor Stephen Simpson, Academic Director of the Charles Perkins Centre and Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences, an initial interest in locust swarms led to a fascination for human nutrition.

"The locust knows what it needs and eats what it needs. We found that actually locusts, and it transpired all other animals that we've studied, have separate appetites for protein, fat, carbohydrate and they can respond with really quite sophisticated nutritional wisdom," Professor Simpson says.

"We then addressed the question; well why is it that humans seem to have such a lack of nutritional wisdom?"

His current research investigates why people eat what they do and how our modern nutritional environment may circumvent basic nutritional wisdom.

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What matters to you?