SN (Samantha) Heerschop MSc

Samantha obtained her Bachelor degree in Nutrition and Health from Wageningen University in 2017, during which she spent time studying at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam and at the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland. During her Master degree in Nutrition and Health, specializing in nutritional epidemiology and public health, she worked at the Radboud University Medical Centre Nijmegen to study the effects of a protein-rich meal service in peri-hospital patient care. During her MSc thesis, Samantha identified healthy and sustainable dietary patterns that fit within current Dutch food habits, and published the results. After graduating in 2020, she was employed as a junior researcher at the Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University to explore what Dutch people consume when they are not consuming meat.

Pursuing her interest in sustainable nutrition, she started working on a PhD project studying acceptable healthy and sustainable Dutch diets using SHARP diet modelling in February 2021. She will also study protein quality and adequacy of the modelled healthy and sustainable diets. Consequently, Samantha will study complementarities and differences between SHARP and CiFoS diet modelling. Samantha is currently studying what the total and utilizable protein intake is in Europe. By studying protein quality and adequacy in healthy and sustainable diets, Samantha aims to provide knowledge that could be used by policy makers for defining for example food-based dietary guidelines that fit in a sustainable food system.