Current research interests include the environmental impact of dental activities; the connection between public health and the resources needed to promote it.

As a part of her educational research Vitalia surveys undergraduate dentistry students in order to examine their level of sustainability awareness.

In 2016, 2017 and 2018 Vitalia was successful in securing funding for projects from FBMH Social Responsibility Engaging our Communities Fund (UoM). The focus of these projects was on preparing dental students to lead a socially-responsible and sustainable oral healthcare system.

Vitalia joined the School of Dentistry in September 2012 to provide supervision to Master-level students and contribute to teaching on the Research Methods (Dent) unit. Her PhD and Master degree are in the field of Social Sciences and she has more than 15 years teaching experience in an academic environment lecturing, running seminars and group workshops.

Each year Vitalia supervises 10+ research projects/ dissertations on the MSc programme in Restorative & Aesthetic Dentistry. Following the launch of a “Sustainable development strategy for the NHS, public health and social care system 2014-2020”, which underlines that approaches to oral health, care and wellbeing need to be increasingly environmentally sustainable, Vitalia encourages her MSc student to research innovative and inexpensive eco-friendly dental material.

From September 2017 Vitalia is the Unit Lead for the Research Methods in Medicine (RM Med) within the Faculty of Biology Medicine and Health (FBMH) and since then is actively involved in curriculum development of this unit. Vitalia incorporated innovation into teaching on the RM Med unit, which has been evaluated and found to be positive and successful, incl. development and implementation of new summative assessments involving innovative content. On the DENT RM unit she continues assisting in setting summative assessments and marking of these assessments. Vitalia has a sound knowledge of research methodology and provides high quality teaching in relation to Research Methodology.

Vitalia has continuously contributed to up-dating of the design and content of Blackboard Learn for the online postgraduate MSc in Restorative and Aesthetic Dentistry to make them user-friendly, consequently leading to improvements in both the delivery and student-teacher interaction. Recently Vitalia has redesigned the resources available on Blackboard for the RM Med unit.

Fellow, The Higher Education Academy

Member of the working group - the Social Responsibility Dental Division Group 

PGCE (Further, Higher and Adult Education), PhD., M.S.Ec.

Since March 2014 Vitalia has been a member of the UoM Sustainability in the Curriculum Community of Practice (CoP). In June 2015 she has run a CoP session to researchers from UoM and MMU, whose research links to sustainability. Vitalia’s session focused on the use of multimedia (video clips, films and images) to enhance Education for Sustainable Development. Over the last four years Vitalia contributed to and organised various ESD initiatives at the Faculty.

In 2017 Vitalia won the "Make the Difference" Award in the category "Outstanding contribution to environmental sustainability". In 2018 Vitalia participated in two international conferences: the ISCN annual conference in Stockholm and Sustainable Dentistry Conference in London.