Food and Markets Department

Tracey has worked for the University since 2004 and has been an integral part of the Natural Resources Institute teaching team since March 2016. As NRI’s Programme Administration Manager, Tracey provides comprehensive support for the implementation of NRI's taught degree programmes. She plays a pivotal role in planning and facilitating student recruitment and programme promotion, serving as the primary point of contact for our students and teaching academics.

Key expertise:

• Programme Administration: Management of academic programme logistics and operations
• Student Support: Providing guidance and support to students & addressing queries
• Records Management: Ensuring compliance with data protection regulations
• Event Coordination: Organisation of student-related events and activities & collaboration with stakeholders for event planning
• Policy Implementation: Implementation of university policies and procedures & ensuring compliance with academic regulations
• Communication: Liaison with faculty, staff, and external partners on student matters & facilitating effective communication channels for student-related issues

Valerie worked closely with the Greenwich Research and Enterprise team as part of a regional consortium before joining Greenwich University full-time 10 years ago. Her role was to help start-up and more established businesses to develop and launch innovative products or services in the UK and abroad. As an innovation and growth specialist for Innovate UK Edge, she helped businesses develop and manage their innovation, developed sustainable and profitable business model and in many cases access finance to support their growth. The support package includes; identifying suitable sources of public or private funding; bringing new and existing products and services to market successfully; managing innovation processes; establishing market and understanding market potential; and  connecting to the wider innovation ecosystem.

Miss Xi He has conducted her PhD study under the supervision of Prof. Henryk Jeleń in the Food Volatilomics and Sensomics Group at Poznan University of Life Sciences, Poland from 2017 to 2023. She was studying the chromatographic techniques to analyse food volatiles for accessing food quality and authenticity. She has defended her doctoral dissertation and awarded as distinction based on top-shelf publications for example: Food Chemistry, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, and Journal of Chromatography A.

Miss Xi He is very active in the scientific activity, she has given talks at 3 international conferences, presented posters, or contributed as a co-author at 7 conferences, for instance 42^nd International Symposium on Capillary Chromatography and the 15^th GCxGC Symposium, 25^th International Symposium on Separation Sciences, Challenges in Food Flavor and Volatile Analysis.

Dr Hayley Thompson joined the NRI in 2022 as a Molecular Microbiologist on the RodentGate project. Prior to joining NRI, Hayley has spent much of her career at King’s College London, where she first undertook her PhD in the Microbiology Department, investigating virulence determinants in a putative oral pathogen, graduating in 2011. On completion of her PhD, she remained at King’s, working in Professor William Wade’s group investigating the role of bacteria in human oral diseases and developing novel methods to cultivate not-yet-cultivated oral bacteria, as part of the Human Oral Microbiome Database effort.

After a career break, Hayley re-joined King’s College London as a part-time Postdoctoral Researcher within the Centre for Host-Microbiome Interactions. Here she resumed her work attempting to cultivate not-yet-cultivated species of oral bacteria, with a specific focus on the candidate phyla radiation bacteria and worked with pharmaceutical companies testing novel anti-biofilm compounds on in-vitro biofilms, modelling the oral bacteriome.

In her PhD and post-doc positions, Hayley has gained extensive knowledge and experience in a variety of microbiological, molecular biology, immunological techniques, and high throughput sequencing techniques. The experience Hayley has acquired over her career at King’s will be utilized in the RodentGate project where she will be using a variety of molecular biology techniques and high throughput sequencing to investigate the presence and prevalence of pathogens in rodents and their potential spread to livestock on farms in the UK and across the EU.

Hayley’s research interests include the characterisation of microbiomes in disease and health using high throughput sequencing techniques, investigating microbial dark matter and the identification and characterisation of virulence determinants in pathogenic bacteria.

Dr Mary Tanyitiku joined the University of Greenwich in October 2023 as a Research Fellow in food and safety. She is a trained food process engineer with experience in academia and the food industry. For example, in 2014 and 2015, she worked with the Netherlands Development Organisation, SNV Cameroon, to improve the performance of women cooperatives/CIG in the diary value chain, that is, production, collection, processing and commercialisation of milk and milk products. This fixed-term field project focused on diet formulation/animal nutrition and incorporated local dairy producers and processors in the Far North dairy platform termed “Plateforme des Acteurs de la Filière Lait de la région de l’Extrême-Nord” (ACFILEN). Then, between 2015 and 2018, she went further as a lecturer to design curriculums and teach modules in the production and processing of arable, animal, and plantation food products as well as in diet formulation/animal nutrition, starting from the very first batch of student teachers (postgraduate level) at the Higher Technical Teachers Training College of the University of Buea, Cameroon. In addition, she was a senior quality and food grader at Kraft Heinz Watties, Christchurch, New Zealand, for four seasons. 

While her MSc research studied the effects of processing methods (germination, toasting, fermentation and soaking) on the technofunctional, nutritional and sensory characteristics of African consumed cereal-based complementary foods, her doctoral research was interdisciplinary and combined qualitative research (in-depth face-to-face interviews, participant observation, visual methods), molecular techniques (DNA extraction, PCR, and gel electrophoresis) and traditional microbial culturing to understand the public health risks of foodborne pathogens among snail meat-consuming populations in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Cameroon. The latter was fully funded by the New Zealand Aid programme.

Despite her career goals in food science, she enjoys teaching French to children under 11 years of age, as a volunteer.

Dr Elena Arribas Lopez is a Lecturer in Food Science at the Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich, where she leads the Food Product and Process Development module. She teaches mainly on the MSc Food Innovation and MSc Food Safety programmes, also contributes to the BSc in Nutrition, and is actively involved in laboratory practices for MSc Food Innovation. Alongside her teaching, Elena supervises postgraduate students on a range of research projects.

Her research focuses on the role of nutrition in wound healing, with a particular interest in how supplement formulations affect Human Dermal Fibroblasts and immune system cells. The aim of her work is to develop functional supplements that can support recovery and improve health outcomes. In the past, she has also explored cytokine release, drug delivery, and 3D printing as part of her wider research in food science and health applications.

Elena completed her PhD at the University of Greenwich with a project titled A Nutritional Approach to Wound Healing: The Role of Supplementation. In this work, she designed supplement formulations from scratch, applied advanced analysis, and evaluated their biological effects. She also holds an MSc in Food Innovation from Greenwich and a BSc (Hons) in Food Science and Technology from the University of Burgos, Spain.

She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has completed further professional training, including the CQI and IRCA Certified Lead Auditor Training Course (ISO 9001:2015) and a Level 3 HACCP Award (Distinction).

At NRI, Dr Spires’ leads the Centre for Food Systems Research alongside forwarding his research interests through a variety of research projects. In this role, he also develops and leads research and innovation consortia with external partners including non-academic stakeholders.

Prior to joining NRI, Dr Spires was a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Food Policy (City St Georges, University of London) where he established and lead new interdisciplinary research projects exploring public policy solutions for healthy diets in the UK and in LMICs.

Dr Spires completed his PhD (2018) in Public Health at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa where he researched low-income community access to safe and nutritious food.