Katia Kouloumprouka Zacharaki

Katia Zacharaki is a plant scientist and agronomist with over a decade of experience in soilless cultivation, specialising in strawberries. Her expertise spans commercial glasshouse production through to Total Controlled Environment Agriculture TCEA, and her career bridges academic research, start up innovation and applied industry focused science. She holds an MSc in Agricultural Engineering and an MBA in Agribusiness.

Katia is Niab’s Total Controlled Environment Agriculture (TCEA) Soft Fruit Specialist, where she helps shape and deliver research to improve production efficiency, propagation performance and fruit quality in controlled environments, while supporting the translation of research outcomes into guidance for commercial glasshouse and polytunnel systems. A key component of her role is contributing to Niab’s involvement in the Defra Farming Innovation Programme project Optimising the propagation environment in TCEA systems to maximise strawberry yield potential in all production systems. Working closely with technology providers and growers, this project aims to develop methods for producing high quality, disease free strawberry propagules with consistent cropping potential for UK supply chains.

She also supports Niab’s work on nutrient demand and resource use efficiency in TCEA strawberries through the Innovate UK project TCEA N demand: Optimising nitrogen and CO₂ inputs to improve assimilation and yields in TCEA strawberry production, which is evaluating low nitrogen fertigation strategies alongside CO₂ enrichment. In parallel, Katia works closely with commercial contracts and collaborative research, supporting the transfer of robust crop science into practical, scalable growing decisions for industry.

Alongside her Niab role, Katia volunteers as Director of Communications for UK Urban AgriTech UKUAT, where she supports engagement, knowledge exchange and collaboration across the UK urban agriculture community. She also undertakes limited independent consultancy through InnoPhyte Consulting, supporting AgriTech teams with experimental planning, data interpretation and translation of research into commercial practice.

PhD and research interests

Katia is completing a part time PhD at Harper Adams University, titled Investigating optimum artificial light for indoor strawberry plants, with expected completion in 2026. Her doctoral research focuses on understanding how light intensity, photoperiod and spectral quality influence strawberry growth, yield and resource use efficiency under TCEA conditions. Supervised by Laura Vickers and Jim Monaghan, the work aims to define lighting strategies that are both biologically effective and commercially viable for indoor strawberry production systems.

Her wider research interests include strawberry cultivar responses to controlled environments, propagation quality in TCEA systems, and the optimisation of nutrient and energy inputs to support consistent, sustainable soft fruit production.