M (Maria) Neocleous Maliotou

I come with a food sience background as I have a master’s degree in food science from Cornell University in the US. After being in the food industry for a few years, I started working as a public agricultural officer at the Ministry of Agriculture in Cyprus on food policy. Being interested in food education of the young generation, I made a career switch towards education and academia. In the last few years, I have been working with schools on school gardening and food sustainability. In the last year, I have been managing RE-TASTY, an IMPETUS-funded citizen science project, which aims to engage secondary school students as citizen scientists in investigating their school food system through the Whole School Approach to make it more sustainable. I am excited because my PhD work aims to build on RE-TASTY by using participatory approaches to produce new scientific knowledge and hopefully have an impact on secondary school food systems.