Dr Darja Sokolić was born in 1968 in Osijek, where he graduated in 1994 at the Faculty of Food Technology. For thirteen years she worked in Saponia dd Osijek as a technologist and then as director of toilet products production. Since 2008 she has worked in the Croatian Food Agency, where currently she is the head of Department for Data Management and Nutrition. In 2013, she got her doctoral title at the Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology in Zagreb, in scientific field of Biotechnology.
During her professional career she attended a great number of trainings in the field of process management, quality and food safety, such as: ” Process data management” REFA Bundesverband e.V. Darmstadt in 2002; Internal Auditor ISO 14001: 2004 and ISO 9001: 2008; BTSF trainings: “Chemical Risk Assessment” (Berlin, 2013) and “Nutrition Risk Assessment” (Lisbon, 2015) and training in the framework of FP7 Total Diet Study (TDS) Exposure Summer School in Lisbon (2013). She has published a dozen scientific papers and participated in numerous international and national conferences.
She is a member of the EFSA Working Group on Food Consumption Data and several committees at the Ministry of Agriculture, related to legislation in the field of food safety. Since 2010, she was appointed as WHO INFOSAN Network Focal Point for Croatia. In 2012, she became a leader of the Croatian team of FP7 project TDS Exposure, the largest EU project in the field of food safety, which includes 26 institutions from 19 countries, for a period of 4 years.
Current focus of her professional work includes the collection and generation of data relevant to the risk assessment of contaminants originating from food, with an emphasis on national research on eating habits, creating a database of recipes and a national database of food composition in order to assess the exposure of the Croatian population to contaminants and nutrients.