Margarethe Cooper, PhD

Margarethe Cooper is an associate pProfessor of practice whose primary focus is teaching courses in food safety, microbiology and parasitology. She develops face-to-face, online and distance coursework in food safety, as well as certifications, through her appointment as the Victor P. Smith Endowed Chair in Food Safety Education. As part of this endowment, she runs a food safety summer program for high school students called SaferFoodCats. The Food Safety Education Endowment supports food safety education initiatives for stakeholders across Arizona, fostering collaborations with school, college, university and industry partners.

Cooper’s most recent research experience was as a research affiliate at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Albany, California, where she contributed to a project in the Food Safety and Microbiology Unit. Her research focused on analyzing the molecular interaction of Escherichia coli O157:H7 on lettuce using next-generation sequencing.

Before joining the U of A, Cooper was an assistant professor at Los Angeles Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California, where she taught microbiology.

Cooper earned her doctorate conducting research on the molecular epidemiology of Giardia lamblia in humans and dogs. Her first postdoctoral fellowship, in the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy at the U of A, involved studying how the malaria parasite (Plasmodium falciparum) feeds on hemoglobin in human red blood cells. In her second postdoctoral fellowship, also at the U of A, she assessed Campylobacter jejuni in the food chain.