Instructor

Leona completed her bachelor’s degree in food studies and nutrition at the University of Leeds in 2013 and went on to work within the food industry as a Nutritionist, then as an Assistant Food Technologist at Sainsbury’s. She left Sainsbury’s to pursue a master’s in Global Health at The University of Gothenburg, Sweden. During the two-year master’s course, Leona undertook an internship at the Manhiça Health Research Centre in Mozambique where she completed qualitive data collection for her master’s thesis on mothers’ health literacy related to malnutrition in under 5-year-old children in southern Mozambique, with the findings published in Public Health Nutrition.

Upon completing her master’s, Leona began an internship at an Ethiopian based research consultancy company and went on to obtain a role there as a Programme Development Assistant. Keen to expand her knowledge in nutrition, Leona went on to start her PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast in 2020 under the supervision of Professor Jayne Woodside and Dr Anne Nugent. Her PhD is centered around the development of food-based dietary guidelines for sustainable and healthy lifestyles with a focus on the role that plant-based meat alternatives. Leona has presented her research at four Nutrition Society conferences, IUNS-ICN (2022) and FENS (2023), with abstracts published from each of the conferences.