Dr Louise Abayomi is a member of the Foods and Markets group within the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich and is a Senior Research Fellow in Postharvest Technology and Marketing Systems.  She is certified with HACCP Level 4 for Food Safety for Manufacturing, BRC Version 8 Lead Auditor. Louise is certified Professional Trainer, and a member of the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI); the International society for tropical root crops (ISTRC); the International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS); and Association of Applied Biologists (AAB).

With 20 years of experience in postharvest systems, of which 10 years were within the private sector, Dr Abayomi has postharvest handling experience across both perishable and durable crops; the management, application, and implementation of appropriate technology within value chains; NPD involving fortification and flour composites, including development of product specifications.  As well as long-term research and development, Louise also undertakes short-term assignments for the private sector, including various strategic organisations such as the United Nations International Development Programme (UNIDO), UK Department for International Development (DfID, now FCDO), and the World Food Programme (WFP) in various areas across the food system continuum.

Dr Parag Acharya, with 14 years of industrial food R&D experience, is leading alternative protein-based food research and innovation at the Natural Resources Institute (NRI). Since joining NRI in 2020, he has taken the helm of the research group focusing on food processing and innovation as well as led the establishment of the Medway Food Innovation Centre equipped with cutting-edge facilities to foster sustainable food technologies. Led by Parag, MFIC has already positioned itself as a key player in the UK for alternative protein research and innovation. It is also playing a key role in $30m Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein led by Imperial College, London where Parag is co-leading the Plant Pillar platform.

Besides, Parag is also the innovation growth manager for Growing Kent and Medway (GKM) agri-food cluster (http://www.growingkentandmedway.com) funded by £17.8 million UKRI Strength in Places grant. As part of the GKM team, he co-authored UKRI report (2022) Alternative Proteins: Identifying UK Priorities (Alternative Proteins Roadmap: identifying UK priorities – UKRI) and is also leading the GKM Alternative Protein Research Network.

Parag is highly skilled in building multi-disciplinary collaborations. He has initiated contacts with StartLife in Wageningen, GROW in Singapore, and Swiss Food Valley to leverage their experiences in setting up a framework for the plant-based food accelerator programme in the Medway campus. This accelerator programme has, so far, brought a significant knowledge exchange impact by delivering business mentoring and technical support to 100+ regional food companies, facilitated 18 new product launches, and helped 12 businesses to successfully apply for further R&D funding.

Since 2021, Parag has also brought a significant research funding (see below) to deliver the scientific unlock on how to innovate climate-smart food utilising sustainable protein sources (e.g. currently leading projects on alternative proteins from under-utilized legumes, algae, agri-food side-streams like spent grain etc.) by connecting domains of ingredient research, novel processing, clean label formulation (e.g. how to replace additives with natural alternatives), and taste & flavour technologies. He is also co-supervisor for a collaborative PhD project (with University of Aberystwyth) on RuBisCO protein funded by the UKRI Food system CDT.  

Parag has been appointed as steering committee member of BBSRC Diet and Health Open Innovation Research Club (OIRC), selected as member of BBSRC Pool of Experts (2023-2026) and was part of Algae-UK organizing committee for developing the Roadmap for Algae in UK diets. He is the steering committee member of the UK-Kenya Alternative Proteins Network (2024). Parag had also featured in Good Food Institute (GFI) website (Meet the researcher: Parag Acharya on building a one stop shop for sustainable proteins - GFI Europe) and was mentioned in the GFI Europe report among top UK researchers in the field of alternative protein (Sustainable proteins in the UK – an ecosystem report (gfieurope.org))

Before joining NRI, Parag had been working for Unilever Food R&D in Netherlands (2011-2020) with a proven track record of successfully delivering patented technologies (lead inventor of 4 patents: WO 2020099180, WO 2017140439 A1, WO 2017001154 A1 and WO 2013189709 A1). He led strategic open innovation partnerships as well as championed several industry-academia collaborations funded by EU FP-7 ITN, TKI-Agri Food, BBSRC-CTPs etc. His pioneering research at Unilever also delivered scientific insights on the causative chemistry of culinary flavour generation by unravelling how aroma generation can be controlled by the optimal processing of plant-based food.

Dr Tonna Ashim Anyasi is a Senior Lecturer in Food Innovation at the Department of Food and Markets, Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich. Dr Anyasi holds a PhD in Agriculture (Food Science and Technology) and an MSc in Food Technology, with research focus on sustainable food and agro-processing, postharvest technology, carbohydrate polymers, phenolics as well as bioactivity, bioavailability and biodigestibility of food matrix in fruits, vegetables, cereal, root and tuber crops.

Before joining the Food and Markets Department, NRI, University of Greenwich, Dr Anyasi was a Senior Researcher at the Agro-Processing and Postharvest Technologies Division, Agricultural Research Council – Tropical and Subtropical Crops, Nelspruit, South Africa. Prior, Dr Anyasi was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and the University of Venda, South Africa where he conducted research on several food processing techniques and their effect on the antioxidant properties and phenolics of tropical fruits, cereal, legumes, root and tuber crops.   

Dr Anyasi has mentored and supervised to completion several PhD and MSc students; is a National Research Foundation of South Africa Y-Rated Researcher; a member of the Early Career Scientist Section of the International Union of Food Science and Technology and International Academy of Food Science and Technology (IUFoST/IAFoST-ECSS); a member of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT); and a professional member of the South African Association for Food Science and Technology (SAAFoST).

Dr. Vahid Baeghbali has joined the NRI in 2022. He has over 10 years of combined industrial and academic experience in research and development (R&D), production, quality control, industrial consultation, and research management.

He has worked for one year as a Research Scholar at McGill University (Canada), 3 years as a research associate and lecturer at Shiraz University and Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (Iran), and currently, he is the Food Processing Enterprise Fellow at the NRI.

During his research, he has designed and fabricated patented food processing machines in pilot scale and worked on their modelling and optimisation.

Dr Aurélie Bechoff has been working as a food technologist at the Natural Resources Institute since October 2009. In her earlier years at NRI as a PhD student (2005–10), Aurélie brought an original contribution to research on the extent of pro-vitamin A carotenoid degradation in sweet potato during its drying and subsequent storage, as part of the HarvestPlus-funded project Reaching End-Users with biofortified sweet potato in Uganda and Mozambique. This led her to coordinate a HarvestPlus- funded project (2012-15) that investigated the provitamin A retention of biofortified yellow cassava in Nigeria during traditional processing. This was followed by an IMMANA-FCDO funded project called NUTRI-P-LOSS on the development of a methodology for estimating nutritional postharvest losses, from harvest to market, for cowpea, maize, and sweet potato in Zimbabwe and Uganda (2016-19). To expand her skills in nutrition, Aurélie completed part-time an MSc in Nutrition for Global Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2017-19). As a result, she became more involved in nutrition projects in LMICs e.g. Agrinatura-EU funded projects such as the 2FAS project on food fortification and the Nutrition Research Fund (NRF) on design gaps of nutrition interventions. Over the years Aurélie has also grown expertise in sensory and consumer research for low-middle-income countries (LMICs) e.g. as part of EU-funded projects AFTER (2011-14) and GRATITUDE (2012-2015) and BMGF-funded CGIAR-RTBFood project (2017-2022) on linkages between breeding traits and consumer acceptability of root and tuber crops in sub-Saharan Africa. Aurélie coordinated a project on the feasibility of developing local ready-to-use therapeutic food formulations for Sierra Leone (2019-20), which resulted in commencement of exciting research in this area: through collaborations in Kenya and Israel funded by UKRI and UUKi, projects (2022-25). Currently Aurelie also coordinates a follow-up Methods and Metrics for Innovative Agriculture and Nutrition Actions (IMMANA) funded project called NUTRI+4AID (2023-24) that validates the tool previously developed and applies it to humanitarian value chains. She leads the NRI component in the ERANET-funded SAFOOD project that seeks to develop more resilient food systems for fruits & vegetables in West Africa (2021-25) in the face of climate change. Her main interest is on the development of sustainable food systems and local formulations to efficiently tackle acute undernutrition in children and micronutrient deficiencies in LMICs. Aurélie personally knows the four recipients of the 2016 World Food Prize in biofortification, as they were collaborators in the first HarvestPlus implementation project and one of them confided to her that her contributions played a role in their achievement. Dr Bechoff has worked in more than 25 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and in South America. French is her mother tongue, and she speaks fluent Spanish.

Dr Baqir Lalani is a Senior Research Fellow in the Food and Markets Department at the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) with experience in the economics/adoption process of improved practices; agricultural innovation systems and farmer decision making/learning processes in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Baqir joined the NRI in 2016 after completing his PhD which explored the farm-level economics and adoption dynamics of Conservation Agriculture (CA) among smallholder farmers in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique. 

Prior to pursuing his PhD, he spent six years' working for the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) in Syria and Tajikistan. His role involved Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) of rural development projects including related to specific value chains i.e. olives, cereals and livestock sectors (e.g. sheep fattening and poultry). Baqir has a keen interest in conducting interdisciplinary research related to sustainable intensification issues, post-harvest loss reduction and in understanding decision-making in smallholder households. He has long-term field experience in Mozambique, Syria and Tajikistan and has conducted consultancy assignments for the FAO, FCDO, WorldFish and the OIC.   

Baqir has secured funding as PI from the University of Greenwich’s seedling fund to undertake a modelling exercise, in collaboration with a team from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), using APSIM to explore different agricultural practices under several climate scenarios. More recently, he was also awarded funding (PI) from the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) to undertake further research in Mozambique (in collaboration with researchers from Michigan State University) to map farmers’ perceptions related to Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices using Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM), alongside on-farm measurements and remote sensing imagery.

Dr Lalani’s role at the University includes a contribution to research, teaching and consultancy, including involvement with undergraduate and postgraduate/ PhD supervision. 

Dr Charoula Konstantia (aka Dina) Nikolaou is an HCPC registered dietitian specialising in Diabetes and Obesity management with several years of clinical nutrition experience in hospitals and community nutrition. She received her PhD in Nutrition from the University of Glasgow specialising in Obesity Prevention in 2014. During her PhD, she developed an eLearning programme for unwanted weight-gain prevention using as a basis two distinct behavioural models, the rationale and the stealth model. Both programmes were successful in preventing weight-gain over a course of a year but mostly the one based on the stealth model, opening new avenues for interventions away from the classical health education model. She further expanded on her eHealth knowledge during her research fellow position for Imperial College and Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in Nanayng Technological University in Singapore. She worked as a researcher and co-ordinator for a WHO-commissioned programme on the effectiveness of different eLearning modalities for training health care professionals.

She joined NRI, Food and Markets department, in January 2020 as a research fellow in Public Health Nutrition. Before joining NRI, she worked at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Medicine, Global Health Policy department and St Luke’s International University, Graduate Public Health School after having been awarded an individual international fellowship from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. Her work in Japan focused on local food policies and legislation and how these affect obesity rates, food availability, and food prices. This work was partly a continuation from her work carried out during her fellowship at the Catholique Université de Louvain in Belgium in 2015-2017. Her work in Louvain focused on how Human Rights and specifically the Right to Food could be utilised to prevent malnutrition (underweight and overweight) along with relevant policies and legislation. She is particularly interested in preventing obesity in young adults, the group at the highest risk for unwanted excessive weight gain. She is trying to achieve this by exploring information on nutrition policies and legislation and their influence into personal decision-making. Moreover, she is trying to utilise modern technology for empowering young citizens to manage their lifestyles by providing vital information in a suitable format. The importance of her work has been recognised by the US Obesity Society while still a PhD student when she received the award for one of the most influential papers for 2014 in the field of Obesity for the paper ‘Preventing weight gain with calorie-labelling’. Her PhD thesis was also shortlisted for the Best Thesis Award in Europe from the European Association for the Study of Obesity in 2015. Several other publications also attracted wide media attention due to their importance for public health policy and practice.

My career as an agricultural economist has been development focused and much of the research work I have undertaken has been applied and people-focused in developing countries. I joined NRI in 1997 having worked in Papua New Guinea for an international development capacity building project, for the EU, for ODA (now FCDO) and for international organisations in Geneva (ILO, GATT). My work at NRI is mainly in postharvest areas of agriculture, particularly in market access and value chain development; I have also been involved in social forestry research, particularly in Malawi, and in biomass energy applications for SME in Sri Lanka and Belize.

Between 2003 and 2004, I was based in Mauritius where I led a small EU project to improve the quality of horticultural exports. Between 2006 and 2010, I was part of the NRI team that worked together with CGIAR researchers (CIP – Jan Low - and HarvestPlus – Howdy Bouis, Anne-Marie Ball), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to develop an approach to reduce vitamin A deficiency via biofortification of orange-fleshed sweet potato varieties to increase their vitamin A content. I developed the marketing strategy for supporting sustainable market development, working with World Vision and other NGOs and two PhD students from Uganda and Mozambique to oversee implementation as well as ascertaining the effectiveness of the approach. I have undertaken market studies on grain legumes for the McKnight Foundation and for ICRISAT.

During the last decade I have become engaged in university teaching, developing courses at Masters level, on Corporate Social Responsibility and Natural Resources Management; Economics, Agriculture and Markets; Understanding Rural Development; Food Marketing, and Food Ethics. I have also developed and delivered a complete MA programme – Rural Development Dynamics. I have used my experience of teaching, particularly of international students, at the University of Greenwich to get involved in supporting teaching and learning at other universities, in the UK and in Africa. I am an external examiner for four Masters courses in agricultural economics at the University of Reading. I have developed and deliver short courses on development to Commonwealth PhD scholars. I have recently delivered training on interactive teaching and learning to staff at Gulu University in northern Uganda, where I am part of a Dutch-government funded NICHE project. My work also encompasses capacity building and I have been involved in FCDO-funded research and training to support capacity development in upgrading value chains, in Mali and Botswana, bringing together policy makers, extension workers and research staff to consider and adopt innovative approaches to increase food security and agricultural incomes. I am currently involved in the Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CD-AIS) project, jointly implemented by AGRINATURA-EEIG and the FAO, and funded by the EU. I am the country focal person for Bangladesh.

Clare has worked in plant science for over thirteen years having joined the Natural Resources Institute in November 2017. Clare works at the Natural Resource Institutes postharvest crop laboratories based at The Produce Quality Centre, a collaboration between NRI and NIAB EMR. In her current role she provides vital planning, technical and research support for the successful delivery of national and international, commercial and academic projects e.g. Innovate UK Coolberry, FreshWorks™, Safepod Agritech. On a day to day basis she provides set up, implementation and assessment on a range of storage and shelf life trials. Clare also provides occasional research support to PhD students and to other non-perishable food crop specialists within NRI, including the Nutritional Postharvest Loss Estimation Methodology (NUTRI-P-LOSS) project.

Previous to this, Clare spent over a decade working at East Malling Research Station and later NIAB EMR. As such she has an extensive experience of working on both top and soft fruit, leaf and root vegetables and ornamental plants and flowers. She has accrued a range of technical and organisational skills, accompanied with essential working knowledge in a number of fields, including plant breeding, entomology, and physiology, applied to academic research, consumer research and commercial farm processes.

Postharvest quality, plant physiology, crop storage management,

Dr Paula Dominguez-Salas joined NRI in July 2020. She has a background in veterinary sciences and in food technology (University of Zaragoza), and has an MSc in Agricultural Sciences (University of Zaragoza) and a MSc and a PhD in Global Public Health Nutrition (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, LSHTM).

Paula started research at LSHTM in 2009 and worked until 2013 at the LSHTM Medical Research Council International Nutrition Group. She left LSHTM to work at a joint Royal Veterinary College (RVC)/ International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) position until early 2017. She re-joined LSHTM in 2017 as an Assistant Professor in Nutrition-sensitive agriculture, also as a joint position LSHTM-ILRI. Before working in in academia, she has worked in international organisations, such as Medecins du Monde or European federations.

Paula´s research has taken place in low- and middle-income countries (West and East Africa and South America), and has focused in maternal and child nutrition. She initially studied the effect of seasonality in maternal nutrition security in Sub-Saharan Africa and different outcomes, including epigenetic profiles of their offspring and aflatoxin exposure in The Gambia. She later merged her two main interests together and moved to the interface between agriculture, specifically livestock production and animal-source foods, and human nutrition, particularly focusing in livestock value chains, food safety and gender aspects. She is involved in several projects in Kenya and Tanzania related to Social Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) strategy design, and to women empowerment among pastoralists. She is also involved in work on urban livestock value chains in Kenya, including a randomised controlled trial to assess the impact of a dairy market intervention in Nairobi, on nutrition. She also participates in the UKRI GCRF Action against stunting Hub, to address the intractable global challenge of child stunting Applying a holistic, Whole Child Approach, and working with communities across India, Indonesia and Senegal.

Beyond working on a regular basis with multidisciplinar teams at LSHTM, ILRI, RVC and LCIRAH, she collaborates with researchers of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Emory University, Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, University of Nairobi in Kenya and with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).