Flora Christine Amagloh

Dr. Flora Christine Amagloh has been a member of OWSD since 2016. She is surrently a senior research scientist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research - Savanna Agricultural Research Institute (CSIR - SARI), based in Northern Ghana. She holds a Ph.D. in Food Science & Technology from Makerere University. She is an alumnus of the OWSD PhD Fellowship.

Dr. Amagloh is passionate about agriculture-nutrition linkages and therefore focuses her research activities on the development of functional foods and their utilization, food analysis, product development, and recipe refinement to improve community nutrition, food processing for value addition, especially with underutilized nutritious crops. She works in the Food and Nutrition Analytical Laboratory (FaNAL) in her institute as the scientist in charge. Her work includes the analysis of food components, both macro and micronutrients, bioactive compounds analysis, sensory evaluation and consumer acceptability studies, food product development, and food processing. She supervises interns, laboratory technicians, technologists, and assistant research scientists to carry out research activities. Her laboratory is responsible for carrying out nutrient composition analysis and consumer acceptability studies on the institute’s mandate crops for varietal release and has contributed to the release of maize, soybean, groundnut, sorghum, and cowpea varieties. As a way of contributing to the Internally Generated Funds (IGF) of her institute, the FaNAL also operates commercially on a fee-for-service basis.

Flora has done extensive work in community nutrition, especially on nutrition sensitization of vulnerable groups such as women and school-aged children in Northern Ghana. She led a team of researchers to educate northern Ghana communities in soybean nutrition, and on how to process soymilk and tofu. She developed a soybean-based household recipe (soybean palava sauce) as a channel to encourage consumption of soybean among these communities. Dr. Amagloh also carried out similar research with cowpea where she worked at the community level with mothers, caregivers, and school children on including cowpea in their diets to increase protein intake.

Flora also liaises and collaborates with other scientists in the institute to write grant proposals and carry out research. She has been involved in competitive research bidding in collaboration with other colleague scientists in CSIR-SARI as well as researchers from the universities and sister research institutes.

Her career as a food scientist has included periods of teaching during which she engages with students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as with fellow scientists. In addition to imparting theoretical and practical knowledge, she fosters an inclusive atmosphere where her colleagues, researchers, mentees, and students feel a sense of belonging and can work towards achieving their full potential.