Carol received her DPhil from the University of York in 1999 and is also an alumnus of Royal Holloway, University of London. She was appointed as Assistant Professor at University of Reading in January 2007 and promoted to Professor in 2017. Carol is presently Professor of Crop Quality for Health in the Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Reading and Research Dean for Agriculture Food and Health. Carol is on the Agriculture Food and Veterinary Science Unit of Assessment panel for REF2021 and is on the editorial boards of Annual Plant Reviews Online and the Journal of Molecular Horticulture. She co-Directs the BBSRC Horticulture Quality and Food Loss Network and the AgriFood Training Partnership.
Carol leads a research group that takes a food-system wide approach to improving the quality of fresh produce and ensuring that everyone has access to it. Quality includes the nutritional value, appearance, flavour and shelf life, and the group enables better quality fresh produce to be offered to consumers through quantifying and manipulating the impact that the growing environment, postharvest handling and supply chain management has on crop quality parameters. Her group’s technical expertise is in linking high-throughput and high-resolution metabolomics data with genetic, molecular and organoleptic profiling in both crops and humans in order to discover regulatory mechanisms associated with flavour and nutritional traits. The diversity of projects in the group all contribute to solving the overarching problem: vegetables and fruit are not consumed in sufficient quantities by consumers to support a healthy diet. This may be for a variety of reasons connected to consumer preference, availability or affordability. In addition, fresh produce that is consumed is often provided through supply chains which have poor sustainability credentials. Only by taking a holistic approach to these problems can we really support consumers from diverse socio-economic backgrounds to be able to choose to eat a sustainable, healthy diet.