Research interests

I am a Research Fellow in Behavioural Sciences in the Institute for Global Food Security.

My research interests primarily include developing meal preparation behaviours (cooking and wider food skills) in both adults and children. I have a particular interest in the underlying developmental skills required by children to perform health behaviours, food education, lifestyle factors influencing student learning, behaviour change, childhood obesity and physical activity.

In 2020, I successfully secured funding to lead a cross-continental survey on changes in cooking and food practices during the COVID-19 pandemic and also parental changes in including children in cooking activities. I am a Co-I on two British Council funded projects in food education and sustainability for schools, which aim to improve their health and contribute to the one-health concept (2021-2022). Additionally, I secured funding as PI from the Association for Commonwealth Universities to explore cooking behaviours and use of convenience products in women in their reproductive years and pregnant women in the UK and Ireland (2021-2022), a collaboration with the University of Newcastle, Australia.

I previously successfully managed a number of multidisciplinary international projects that led to the development of evidence-based age-appropriate cooking skills recommendations for children and validated measures of children’s perceived cooking competence (CooC11 & CooC7). I additionally, secured funding to undertake a secondment in the Republic of Ireland to assess the effectiveness of a parent-child cooking intervention.

I am currently employed to investigate behaviours around the use of prepared convenience meals particularly in older adults and have previously worked on multiple UK and EU funded projects including a whole-school approach food environment intervention, an investigation of consumers’ perceptions around nutrition and health claims and consumer trust in the food chain.

Teaching

I have experience of delivering in-person lectures to the undergraduate students in ‘Food Quality, Safety and Nutrition’ and postgraduate research students specifically in the areas of research methods and food choice. I have given multiple invited online lectures to undergraduate and postgraduate students across Ireland and the UK in the areas of Behaviour change, public health, societal changes and food choice, and qualitative research methods and analysis. I have been a co-supervisor on a number of undergraduate and postgraduate projects in behavioural sciences.

I also have a strong commitment to continuous professional development, and completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching at Queen’s obtaining Fellow status of Advance HE (formerly the Higher Education Academy).