Saskia van Ruth

In August 2023, Saskia van Ruth joined UCD as Full Professor of Food Supply Chain Integrity. Over the past two decades her research and teaching in various universities has focused on the integrity in food supply chains, food fraud prevention and food authentication. She worked in this area before at Wageningen University, Wageningen Research, Queen's University Belfast and University College Cork.

During her research and teaching career, which covers over 30 years, she has initiated, led and conducted hundreds of projects with a wide variety of stakeholders from multinational food industry actors to regulators, from media companies to the hospitality sector, from farmers in China to privately-owned vineyards in South Africa. In the past ten years, this involved this included 19 EU projects, i.e. FFraud-ER, 2 BTSF food fraud courses development projects, EUCHINASAFE, Phasmafood, AuthentNet, FoodIntegrity, Spiced, AuthenticFood, PIMMS, QSAFFE, MoniQA, MacOils, Feeding Fat Safety, Fat Authentication, Cost Action SensorFint, Cost Action Saffronomics, Cost Action Farm Animal Proteomics, and Cost Action Feed for health. She coordinates the European initiative EFF-CoP, a project which establishes and mobilises the European Food Fraud Community of Practice - a project starting from January 2025. During her career she has (co-)authored over 330 scientific publications. Furthermore, she has taught thousands of students in the area of food integrity, food (analytical) chemistry, and sensory science from primary school pupils to BSc, MSc, and PhD students, food and feed supply chain actors, as well as regulators and policymakers. Furthermore, she have been lucky to mentor over 175 PhD/MSc/BSc thesis students so far.