Dr Jennifer Attard

Dr Jennifer Attard is a Research Project Manager within the Circular Bioeconomy Research Group at Munster Technological University, Kerry. Her main focus is on food waste prevention.

She currently works on the H2020 project agroBRIDGES, empowering farmers through Short Food Supply Chains, and has recently worked on a Marine Institute-funded Socio-economic Study of Seaweed Harvesting in Ireland (in collaboration with the Clean Technology Centre), and the DAFM-funded Surplus Redistribution from the Irish Produce Sector (in collaboration with FoodCloud).

She was previously a Principal Investigator on the EPA-funded Efficient Food project; quantifying and understanding national food loss and waste from primary production in Ireland, as well as a Circular Bioeconomy Researcher on the BBI-JU project ICT-BIOCHAIN: Digitising Ireland’s Bioeconomy to improve the efficiency and competitiveness of biomass supply chains.

Dr Attard lectures and supervises students on Biobased Value Chains as part of Ireland’s first postgrad course in Bioeconomy with Business. Her expertise is in circular economy, having worked with several different complex natural mixtures and waste streams including orange-peel waste, shrimp-shell waste, agricultural waste, electronic waste, hemp extracts (for which she has a patent pending) and algal extracts, recovering materials or creating value through the production of bio-based chemicals and products.

Dr Attard received her BSc (Hons) in Chemistry with Materials from the University of Malta and her PhD in Chemistry from the Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence at the University of York, which was funded by the Endeavour Scholarship.