Catherine Wright Donnelly (born 1956) is Professor of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Vermont,[1] and the Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Companion to Cheese,[2] which won the 2017 James Beard Award for Reference and Scholarship.
At that time, a large outbreak of illness caused by a relatively unknown bacterium, Listeria monocytogenes, occurred in Boston, Massachusetts.
She developed procedures for detection of Listeria in food, resulting in UVM medium, used by the USDA as part of its official meat testing program.
In 2004, she and her colleague Paul Kindstedt became co-directors of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese (VIAC)[5] at UVM, an organization that provided education to over 1500 individuals from 48 states and 13 countries.
Donnelly had a cameo appearance in Netflix's documentary adaptation of Michael Pollan’s book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.