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The Nutrition Innovation Centre for Food and Health (NICHE) performs fundamental research to understand the links between diet and human development.

We aim to solve the chronic diseases of ageing, obesity, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis and cognitive decline by investigating the potential impact of diet and food quality on the underlying mechanisms leading not only to disease but also to maintaining health.

Human nutrition research at Ulster University is coordinated through the Nutrition Innovation Centre for Food and Health (NICHE), which was initially set up to provide greater understanding of diet-related health issues.

We currently have 22 academic, 3 technical, and 15 research staff, together with 36 postgraduate research students and 9 internships.

REF14 result

We are very proud of our result in the REF14, the Biomedical Sciences submission, which included nutrition research, was ranked within the top five out of 94 universities submitted in terms of research power.

Our research environment was awarded an unprecedented 100% 4* (world-leading), 95% of our research impact (predominantly arising from nutrition research) was scored world leading (4*) and internationally excellent (3*) and 81% of research published papers were judged to be world leading and internationally excellent (4* and 3*).