Athanasia Goula is an Associate Professor in Design and Optimization of Food Processing in the Department of Food Science and Technology, Faculty of Agriculture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She received her bachelor’s (1996) and Ph.D. (2005) degrees from the Department of Chemical Engineering, School of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and her M.Sc. (2006) degree in Quality Management from the Hellenic Open University. She has worked as chemical engineer in an industry of canned vegetables and salads (1997-1998), as post doctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2005-2007), as Research Associate in the Laboratory of Food Process Engineering at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2007-2010) and as a Lecturer in the Department of Quality Control and Trade of Agricultural Products of the Technological Institute of West Macedonia and in the Department of Food Technology of the Technological Institute of Larissa (2005-2009). She took a Lecturer position in the Department of Food Science and Technology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2010 and she was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2015 and to Associate Professor in 2019. She is the author/co-author of 77 peer-reviewed publications (SCI journals), 12 book chapters, 1 book, and more than 100 contributions to national and international conferences with more than 5.00 citations (h-index = 37). Her research interests include the management and valorization of food waste, the development of pilot scale processing equipment, the design of drying processes, the modeling of food processing using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes, and the modelling of nutrient destruction during food processing. She has published many papers focusing on the valorization of various food industry by-products (grape pomace, orange juice by-products, pomegranate peels and seeds, peach peels and seeds, unused chokeberries, olive mill wastewater, olive leaves, spent coffee grounds, lavender waste) to obtain high-value products (phenolic extracts in liquid, dry, or encapsulated form, fibers), using various processes such as extraction (conventional, ultrasound-assisted, microwave-assisted, enzyme-assisted), enzymatic hydrolysis, and adsorption.