Rockaya Maha

Maha Rockaya is a Syrian pharmacist and food scientist, and a PhD candidate in the Doctoral School of Food Science and Nutrition at the Institute of Nutrition, University of Debrecen. Maha completed her bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Tishreen University, followed by a Master’s degree in Analytical and Food Chemistry, specializing in Food Control.

In 2021, she was awarded the Stipendium Hungaricum Scholarship, which enabled her to pursue doctoral research in predictive microbiology and data-driven food safety. Her PhD work focuses on applying mathematical and statistical modelling to understand microbial behavior in plant-based milk alternatives, aiming to improve food safety assessment. Her research also involves biochemical data analysis and the development of ontology-based databases integrating microbial growth kinetics with food composition. She also focuses on the reparameterization, rescaling, and comparison of primary and secondary models to recommend the regression methods, models, and transformations that yield the most robust and reliable predictions.

Before beginning her PhD studies, Maha worked in Syria as a community pharmacist, as a medical representative and as a lecturer at Tishreen University and Al-Andalus University, where she taught subjects within the pharmacy curriculum.

Throughout her doctoral studies, Maha has been an active researcher, presenting her work at major European food safety conferences, including several meetings of the International Association for Food Protection and the ICPMF community. She is the recipient of the 2025 IAFP European Symposium Student Travel Award.

Her scientific contributions include participating in 8 scientific conferences with different oral presentations and posters about her research and 5 publications in respected international journals, such as the International Journal of Food Microbiology, Food Microbiology, Current Opinion in Food Science, Nutrition and Nature Scientific Data.