Maria Traka brings UK leadership to ELIXIR Food & Nutrition Community

In March 2025, Dr Maria Traka was appointed as the new co-Lead of the ELIXIR Food & Nutrition Community, joining Dr Jildau Bouwmann (ELIXIR Netherlands) and Dr Frédérique Lisacek (ELIXIR Switzerland) in shaping the future of this collaborative community. With an extensive background in nutrition research and data harmonisation, Maria brings extensive expertise that aligns closely with the Community’s mission to standardise food and nutrition data, improve accessibility and foster interoperability across tools and services.

Currently serving as Head of Food & Nutrition National Bioscience Research Infrastructure at Quadram Institute, Maria is advancing nutritional research infrastructure in the UK. Her work includes managing national nutrient composition data and aligning nutrition data with emerging sustainability data infrastructures. She has also developed tools such as FoodBioactivesDB and is extending nutrient composition analysis to include dietary bioactive composition data within subgroups of health cohorts from UK Biobank and EPIC. 

Reflecting on her alignment with the ELIXIR Food & Nutrition Community’s objectives, Maria stated:

“My expertise aligns closely with the ELIXIR Food and Nutrition Community’s goals. I am particularly motivated to contribute to its mission of standardizing food and nutrition data, making data more available and reusable, and driving tool and service interoperability.”

Her work in harmonising diverse datasets exemplifies this commitment from the very early stages of this ELIXIR Community. She was Principal Investigator in the first project of the ELIXIR Food & Nutrition Community when she led efforts to standardise food, nutrition and microbiome data. Complementary to this, she was Principal Investigator in Food & Nutrition Security Cloud (a Horizon2020 Project) where she led the development of FAIRspace – a web application for making diet and microbiome research data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).

For ELIXIR-UK, Maria’s appointment is expected to strengthen national efforts to enhance food and nutrition research infrastructure. Her expertise in linking nutrient composition data with sustainability frameworks offers opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. Furthermore, her contributions to standardising data across domains will help address fragmentation in research while supporting UK researchers in accessing high-quality datasets.

As co-Lead of the ELIXIR Food & Nutrition Community, she will be key in driving initiatives that benefit both ELIXIR-UK members and the broader European consortium.