Dr Áine Hennessy is a Lecturer in Nutritional Sciences at the School of Food and Nutritional Sciences at University College Cork, where she teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes on core nutrition topics including nutritional assessment, food choice and eating behaviour, nutritional epidemiology and public health nutrition.
She is a Lead Investigator at the Irish Centre for Maternal and Child Health Research (INFANT), a Principal Investigator at the Cork Centre for Vitamin D and Nutrition Research at UCC, and a Funded Investigator in the Co-Centre for Sustainable Food Systems.
Áine graduated from University College Cork with a BSc in Nutritional Sciences in 2010 and a PhD in Nutrition in 2013. Her PhD investigated the role of fortified foods in the diets of Irish adults and preschool children using Irish national food consumption data. During her postdoctoral training at the Cork Centre for Vitamin D and Nutrition Research, her focus shifted to nutritional epidemiology – including health and nutritional exposures during pregnancy and early life and associations with clinically validated health outcomes. In 2019, Áine was awarded an independent research fellowship from Science Foundation Ireland to support her work on functional indicators of iodine status during pregnancy and associations with infant neurodevelopment outcomes.
In addition to her teaching and research commitments, Áine is a Section Editor (Vitamins and Micronutrients) at the European Journal of Nutrition.