Microbiologist
Prior to joining QIB Extra in March 2017 as a Microbiologist, Kirsty Holmes gained a Bachelor of Science degree in Animal and Plant Biology at Sheffield University and then spent over 22 years working in the food industry in various food manufacturing roles, including Quality Assurance, Technical, Hygiene, production, and predominantly as an industrial microbiologist.
Kirsty spent over 16 years running the internal Chemistry and Microbiology laboratories at Bernard Matthews Ltd. in Norwich, covering a wide variety of nutritional and microbiological tests. These included standard food tests such as Group 1 nutrition, pH, Water activity, and food pathogen testing such as Listeria spp., Salmonella spp., and Campylobacter spp., as well as routine indicator and spoilage tests. She was involved in both method development, validation, and quality assessment of all method performances, garnering a wide variety of test method experience using standard and innovative techniques over the years.
Kirsty additionally gained experience assisting other departments with problem solving in relation to microbiological issues within the production areas and across the business as a whole.