Dr Rachael Thurecht | UniSC | University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

Rachael is an Accredited Practicing Dietitian and Sports Dietitian who has a passion for nutrition, teaching and research projects. For Rachael, her interest in research began during her Bachelor Nutrition and Dietetics (Honours). Her Honours research focused on Australian dietitians’ perceptions of the healthiness of packaged foods and resulted in two published articles. Since graduating in 2016, Rachael has had the opportunity to further pursue her interests through a USC, scholarship supported PhD.

Rachael’s PhD research centred on the development and validation of an Athlete Food Choice Questionnaire in a sporting and culturally diverse group of high-performance athletes. Her research seeks to translate current knowledge on the multifactorial construct of food choice into a questionnaire for practitioners, researchers and individual athletes to examine the relative influence of various factors on food choice. Rachael collected data at the 2017 Universiade (Taipei, Taiwan) and 2018 Commonwealth Games (Gold Coast, Australia) where she was also part of the Nutrition Service Team. In this role Rachael provided training and advice to caterers and hosted the nutrition desk within the athlete’s dining hall, where she assisted athletes with food and nutrition information and consultations.