Dr Denise O'Leary
Head of School
Tel: 01 220 5772
Before joining the School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology, Dr. Denise O’Leary was an Assistant Head in the School of Hospitality Management and Tourism at TU Dublin. Prior to working at TU Dublin/DIT she worked as a manager, lecturer and researcher at third level institutions in Ireland and the United States including IT Tralee, UCD and Tulane University. She also worked for over ten years as a research/management consultant in the private sector, during which time, she successfully facilitated a broad variety of evaluation and strategic planning activities.
She is passionate about education and has introduced, and been part of, a number of student-focused initiatives. She is also an active researcher, focusing on the areas of collaboration and skills development, and has worked with practitioners from across diverse sectors, integrating action research and action learning into organisation development and team development. She is especially interested in inter-organisational collaboration within networks, including food tourism networks. She is one of the Irish leads for the NTG and PANTOUR alliances, which are European-wide and European Commission-funded initiatives. These alliances include education providers, industry providers and policy makers and are focused on addressing skills needs and shaping European policy on skills development in a number of sectors including the food and drink sector. Prior to that she was involved in TRADEIT, another European Commission-Funded project which supported traditional food SMEs in the areas of collaboration, entrepreneurship and innovation.
Denise is currently an editorial board member and reviewer for various journals, a steering board member of Action Research Group Ireland, and an external examiner. Previously, she acted as Scientific Chair of the Action Research Colloquium and the EuroCHRIE conference and has been an invited speaker and rapporteur at a number of national and international seminars and events.