Dr Stacey Duvenage joined the Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich as a Lecturer in Food Safety within the Food and Markets Department in July 2021.

Before joining the NRI, Stacey held the position of Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Part-time lecturer within the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Research areas included bacterial food safety of fresh produce in the formal and informal sector, food genomics, and antibiotic resistance in the agroecosystem. Stacey is a bacterial food safety expert with a passion for fresh produce safety within the formal and informal supply chains. Further aspects of research include pathogen and antimicrobial resistant organism occurrence and characterisation, including traditional and next generation technologies. Additionally, a further focus area includes quality indicators of water and fresh produce through metadata analysis. She is very passionate about next generation technologies and was instrumental in attaining the funding for three high impact, next generation and cutting-edge technology platforms within the Plant Health and Safety laboratories. Stacey has published several papers in high impact journals and has co-supervised numerous students at Hons, MSc and PhD levels.

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 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.