The National COVID-19 Food Survey - Key Findings

The National COVID-19 Food Survey - Key Findings

Seminar Summary

Join the UCD Research Partners team for our regular 30min chat with researchers currently pursuing research relating to COVID-19 from across the 6 Colleges of UCD. In this session we will talk with Prof Eileen Gibney (UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science) about an exciting national survey recently completed. This survey polled 4,000 participants about eating and drinking behaviours and food preparation during the pandemic.

Prof Eileen Gibney

Associate Prof Eileen Gibney (BSc, PhD, MSc) has worked in the area of human nutrition since 1997. Graduating with a degree in human nutrition from Ulster University, she then obtained her PhD from the Dunn Nutrition Unit, University of Cambridge in 2001. She went on to complete an MSc in Molecular Medicine (TCD) in 2003. Eileen held post-doctoral positions at the University of Newcastle and Trinity College Dublin, before joining UCD as Lecturer in Nutrition in 2005. Her current research interests lie in the area of personalised nutrition, where she investigates response, including inter-individual variation in response, to nutrition interventions, and develops strategies and innovative technologies for personalised dietary and lifestyle feedback. Eileen has/is a PI on many national and international projects including; food4me, Food for Health Ireland, Insight and FNS-Cloud. She is a Deputy Director of the UCD Institute of Food and Health and a member of the academic staff for the BSc Human Nutrition. She was Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning for the School of Agriculture and Food Science from 2015-2019, and is currently the Director of Executive Education. Eileen was a Director of the Irish Association for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism (IrSPEN) from 2010 to 2019. She is currently a Trustee of the Nutrition Society of UK and Ireland. She sits on the Public Health Nutrition sub Committee in the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.

UCD COVID-19 Seminar Series

In order to help tackle this pandemic, we must leverage multidisciplinary research and innovation expertise from across our academic institutions. This highly relevant expertise spans a wide range of disciplines both scientific and non-scientific. Indeed, it is important to note that while the fundamental challenges is a health-related emergency, this pandemic will have significant implications for our society, our economy and future policy.

Across UCD and in our university hospitals, researchers are rising to the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic. They are providing critical supports that have a real and tangible impact on patients’ lives. They are expanding Ireland’s testing capacity, developing new supply chains, manufacturing reagents, developing national contact tracing capability, and investigating new ways to tackle the disease.

Our researchers are working to better understand the impact on the health of our children during this pandemic, the impact on individuals with intellectual and disabilities and their caregivers, they are new methods for screening antiviral compounds, coordinating primary care networks, manufacturing PPE, producing critical reagents for testing, modelling populations behaviours, developing new medical devices to mitigate the risk of disease spread, investigating the host response to the disease, developing innovative remote monitoring technologies, and developing novel national disease surveillance methods.

This seminar series will showcase on-going COVID-19 related research at UCD to help facilitate greater interdisciplinary collaboration within UCD and with external partners.

We are using Basecamp to continue the conversation and facilitate collaboration online at UCD. Please select "Yes, please add me to UCD C19 Research Basecamp Portal" when prompted during the Eventbrite event registration process. Alternatively, please complete the webform linked here to join the UCD C19 Research Basecamp Portal.