Professor Helene McNulty is Director of the Nutrition Innovation Centre for Food and Health (NICHE), a centre of excellence for nutrition research at Ulster University. She is an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy and Fellow of the International Union of Nutritional Sciences. Having graduated from Trinity College Dublin (BSc and PhD in Nutrition) and the Dublin Institute of Technology (Diploma in Dietetics), Helene worked for 2 years as a nutritionist in the food industry before joining Ulster University in 1992 and being promoted to her current academic post, Professor of Human Nutrition & Dietetics, in 2001. The purpose of her research – with particular expertise in folate and metabolically-related B vitamins – is to provide greater understanding of nutrition-related health issues, to achieve tangible impact to facilitate policy aimed at disease prevention, and to drive innovation activities. Apart from managing a large nutrition research group, Helene is actively involved in lecturing in Food, Nutrition and Dietetics at undergraduate and masters levels, and in supervising research students to PhD level.
Helene’s role in the VALID project is as overall Project Coordinator and PI at Ulster University in collaboration with partners in Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and University of Parma (Italy). In this role, she is leading the research team to build substantially on the existing Trinity, Ulster and Department of Agriculture (TUDA) study – a unique resource on 5200 adults aged 60+ years recruited from the UK and Ireland – to determine the role of procyanidin-rich foods in preventing cognitive decline in 1000 participants from the original TUDA cohort being re-sampled 6 years after initial investigation. h.mcnulty[AT]ulster.ac.uk.
