Dr. Denise O’Leary is Head of School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology.  Her research focuses on on the areas of collaboration, skills development and women entrepreneurship and she 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 the Irish lead for the NTG and PANTOUR alliances, which are European-wide, 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 the tourism/ hospitality/culinary 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. She supervises PhD students and is a reviewer for a number of journals. She is an active member of the action research/action learning community and is on the steering committee of the annual Action Research Colloquium.