Maha is a Syrian junior researcher currently based in Hungary. She holds a B.Sc. in Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Chemistry from Tishreen University (2016). However, witnessing food insecurity during the Syrian conflict—particularly the shortage of infant formula and families resorting to unsafe alternatives— shaped her passion for food safety and security. This led her to pursue an M.Sc. in Food Control at the same university (2021). Following her master's degree, she joined the Nutrition Institute at the University of Debrecen as a visiting researcher, working with the computational nutrition research team on building a human milk database called MilkyBase (Pacza et al., 2022). Then she was awarded the Stipendium Hungaricum scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in Food Science at the same institute. Her research focuses on predictive microbiology and data analysis, specifically in the context of the plant-based milk bio-composition and its influence on microbial growth. She is also interested in categorizing sources of error within the field of predictive microbiology. In her recently published paper (Rockaya & Baranyi, 2024), she introduced the terms "dry" vs. "wet" sources of error to better classify these uncertainties. With a background in pharmacy, coupled with a passion for food science and mathematics, Maha brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to her work. She aims to link between academia and industry, fostering collaboration between life scientists (wet science) and experts in quantitative fields (dry science).”
Cooking, Friends Gatherings, Reading, Nature.
