Dr Jennifer Attard

Dr Jennifer Attard is a Principal Investigator in Sustainable Food Systems with the Circular Bioeconomy Research Group at Munster Technological University, Kerry. She currently works on the SFI-funded FRED Project: Food Resource Efficiency Decision Support as well as the H2020 project agroBRIDGES, supporting Short Food Supply Chains. 

She has also worked on FoodCloud’s Apple Gleaning Project and the FoodCloud Surplus Food Redistribution from Irish horticulture sector project. She was a Principal Investigator on the EPA-funded Efficient Food project, quantifying and understanding national food loss and waste from primary production in Ireland. Other projects have included a Socio-economic study of seaweed harvesting in Ireland and ICT-BIOCHAIN: Digitising Ireland’s Bioeconomy.

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.