News
New colleague Maria Neocleous Maliotou joined ELS per March 2025
My name is Maria and I will soon officially start as a PhD candidate at ELS. I come from Cyprus and I have been living in The Netherlands for the last few years.
I am very excited to start my PhD work on a topic that I am very much interested in. Together with Arjen Wals and Valentina Tassone from WUR, as well as with Chrysanthi Kadji-Beltran from Frederick University in Cyprus, we will be researching secondary school food systems in The Netherlands and in Cyprus and how participatory approaches such as citizen science can contribute to creating more sustainable school food cultures.
My career started with a master’s degree in food science at 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 to produce new scientific knowledge and hopefully have an impact on secondary school food systems.
I enjoy listening to music, making mosaics, going for walks in nature, travelling to new places, preparing my garden in the springtime for the nice weather ahead and going out for a warm drink with friends!
Contact: maria.neocleousmaliotou@wur.nl
PhD project: Creating healthy and sustainable food cultures and practices in secondary schools using the Whole School Approach combined with citizen science - WUR