Areas of Expertise
- Investigating fundamental molecular and complex ingredient interactions as they impact grain and food composition, structure, and functionality, with applications to nutrition, health, and food quality.
- Current expertise includes protein and carbohydrate chemistry and structure-function relationships, bioactive phytochemicals and compounds, food matrix interactions and physicochemical functionality, and analytical tools development and applications to accurately characterize food matrix and complex interactions of food biomolecules as they influence food quality and health.
- Applying engineering principles, advanced analytics, and data-driven tools to improve manufacturing process efficiency, ingredient innovation, product functionality and nutritional quality, consumer acceptance, and affordability.
- Current areas of specialization include raw material and ingredient testing, nutrient delivery platforms, carbohydrate research, fermentation and baking applications, extrusion technologies, grain milling science, non-thermal technologies, and digital manufacturing systems and process analytics to improve grain and food manufacturing efficiency and product consistency and quality.
- Developing value-added ingredients and processing strategies that promote sustainability, resource efficiency, and resilient food systems.
- Current research areas include functional applications of alternative climate-resilient food crops, plant-based proteins and peptides, novel food manufacturing byproduct valorization and biorefining technologies, energy-efficient and sustainable food manufacturing technologies.
- Advancing animal feed and pet food manufacturing technologies, ingredient quality, and nutritional outcomes to support animal health, welfare, and production sustainability.
- Current expertise includes feed processing and manufacturing technologies, feed ingredient evaluation and quality assessment, nutrient digestibility and bioavailability, companion animal nutrition and metabolism, monogastric nutrition, pet food formulation and extrusion processing, and feed and pet food safety.
- Innovations in microbial systems and associated areas to mitigate safety challenges across grain, food, and feed systems to protect human and animal health, enhance nutritional outcomes, and ensure product quality, safety, and biosecurity.
- Current research areas include microbiome technologies, fermentation science for enhanced baked product performance, food macromolecule structure-microbiome interactions, novel non-thermal food and feed pathogen-mitigation strategies.