University and Faculty Network

Incoming graduate students need to complete each of the following steps, but may -depending on priority- decide in which order to accomplish them:

Network List

Utah State University

Faculty and Research
  • Earl Creech - Plants, soils, climate, and Critical agronomic issues facing farmers and ranchers in Utah and throughout the western U.S
  • Korry Hintze - Diet, chronic disease, gut microbiome, and gut health.
  • Silvana Martini - Physicochemical & sensorial characterization of food materials (lipids in particular), food quality materials affected by nano-, micro, and macroscopic characteristics.
    Donald McMahon: Emeritus professor & WDC Director (not taking graduate students).
  • Taylor Oberg - Microbial genetics and food safety preventive controls.
  • Prateek Sharma - Dairy Processing and technology, dairy chemistry, cheese chemistry and technology, dairy powders. Cheese structure-function relationships, food structure design and its impact on functionality of dairy ingredients and products, rheology of dairy products.
  • Stephan van Vliet - Critical linkages between agricultural production methods, the nutrient density of food, and human health.
  • Robert Ward - Bioactive nutrients, fiber, PUFA and inflammation, gut integrity. 

Brigham Young University

Faculty and Research
  • Gene Ahlborn - Flavor chemistry and development: fermentation, reaction & process flavors, food safety & toxicology, biotechnology.
  • Michael Dunn - Micronutrient fortification and stability, Novel food products & processes, and product development.
  • Brad Geary - Identification of food-borne pathogens with molecular sensing technics and fungal & bacterial associations with plants.
  • Laura Jefferies - Sensory analysis & consumer insights & marketing, dairy science, packaging design & messaging, and food processing & engineering.
  • Jason Kenealey - Milk protein biochemistry, protein unfolding & protein stability, protein-ligand binding interactions, recombinant protein expression, isothermal titration calorimetry, differential scanning calorimetry, and microcalorimetry.
  • Shintaro Pang - Improve the safety, quality and nutrition of our food supply by developing rapid analytical methods that enable us to detect, quantify and/or characterize target contaminants or compounds present in food. 
  • Richard Robison - Bacterial agents that cause disease in man and animals are the focus of our research. Pathogenic mechanisms these organisms use to evade host immune mechanisms and cause disease is a specific focus.
  • Doug Tree - Dairy: crystallization, triacylglycerol phase behavior. Equipment: Anton Paar Modular Compact Rheometer with Peltier temperature control 

Brigham Young University-Idaho

Faculty and Research
  • Steve Winkel (undergraduate students only) - Dairy processing, food safety & quality, and product development.

University of Utah

Faculty and Research
  • Micah Drummond - Metabolic disease & disfunction, and utilizing therapeutic tools (nutritional, contractile analogs, pharmacological) to limit muscle and metabolic deficits that occur with physical inactivity in aged muscle.
  • Tanya Halliday - How exercise of differing modalities influences appetite regulation, energy intake, non-exercise physical activity, body weight management, development of novel interventions for weight loss maintenance, and examination of mechanisms linking lifestyle habits (diet and exercise) to glycemic-related outcomes.

Boise State University

Faculty and Research
  • Owen McDougal - Development of optical spectroscopy techniques that compliment the Kjeldahl method of protein analysis, dairy protein chromatographic separation & purity assessment, and drug development with components of milk.
  • Konrad Meister - Biomolecules with unique interfacial properties, how they work on the molecular scale, and how we can use them in innovative dairy applications. Biomolecules we are currently working on are antifreeze proteins and their usage in frozen desserts, BSA and hydrophobins and their usage in foams, and lactoferrin and its antibacterial properties and ion binding capabilities. Recently, we also started using confocal Raman microspectroscopy to investigate the structural transitions of yogurt and cheeses as a function of temperature. 
 

University of Idaho

Faculty and Research
  • Gulhan Unlu - Targeting main agricultural interests, commodities (dairy, potatoes, fish) and byproducts (cheese whey, potato peel waste, fish skin/bones) in ID and WA.
  • Ginny Lane - Community and global nutrition; food security risks among vulnerable populations, international and Indigenous contexts; determinants of chronic disease; and multidisciplinary mixed methods approaches to complex issues.

Oregon State University

Faculty and Research
  • Zeynep Atamer - Dairy science, dairy microbiology, dairy bacteriophages, spore formers, process & and food safety, thermal inactivation, inactivation kinetics, milk proteins, heat-stable milk enzymes, fractionation of casein, membrane separation, and cheese technology.
  • Serkan Ates - Carbon neutral livestock farming, plant bioactive compounds, livestock production in agrivoltaics systems, management of forbs in dryland pasture, dual purpose management of pastures for livestock and pollinators, and use of spent biomass in rumination nutrition.
  • Sheri Cole - Food science & technology work force training and dairy extension.
  • Chris Curtin - Fermentation microbiology and food spoilage prevention, spanning a range of fermented foods and beverages. Applications of genomics and molecular biology to understand microbial community function.
  • David Dallas - Identify novel, evolutionarily relevant bioactive compounds in human & bovine milk & the extent to which they survive throughout the digestive system.
  • Lisbeth Goddik - FST department head (not accepting students).
  • Melanie Hanlon - Food science and technology, cheesemaking and microbiology of dairy products.  product development, and sustainable food systems.
  • Jovana Kovacevic - Food microbiology & safety using molecular methods and whole genome sequencing to trace, understand, and prevent contamination.
  • Juyun Lim - The areas of taste and smell perception, two of the main components of flavor perception, and its impact on ingestive behavior. My second research focus is on sensory testing methodology.
  • Si Hong Park - A food safety program included genomics, metagenomics, and transcriptomics based on a next generation sequencing and bioinformatics; the detection, identification and control of foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria, Campylobacter and E. coli from farms to forks using various molecular techniques.
  • Michael Qian - Flavor chemistry of small fruits; grape and wine, beer; hop, and dairy products. I am interested in solventless sample preparation technique such as solid phase micro-extraction, solid phase dynamic extraction, stir bar sorptive extraction and instrumental analysis with an emphasis on GC, fast GC, HPLC, GC-MS, GC-MS/olfactometry, and multi-dimensional GC/GC-MS analysis.
  • Joy Waite-Cusic -  Pre-harvest food safety, process validation, prevalence of pathogens in food systems, and microbiological quality indicators and spoilage.

Washington State University

Faculty and Research
  • Courtney Gardner - Molecular biotechnology applied to address current challenges at the interface of agriculture, environmental science,and engineering. Assess microbial adaptation to environmental stressors in both natural and engineered systems and manipulate the dynamics that exist between microbial communities and their environment.
  • Kristen Johnson - Efficacy of dairy water treatment though the use of vermiculture systems to enhance the use of water, reduce emissions, and create value-added products.
  • Carolyn Ross - The theoretical basis underpinning the sensory perception (aural, oral, and tactile) of foods and wines and to correlate these psychophysical attributes with quantifiable characteristics. 
  • Meijun Zhu - Microbiological food safety and effects of dietary bioactive compounds on gut microbiota and chronic diseases. For the nutrigenomic study, we are studying impacts of diets on intestinal epithelial differentiation, gut microbiome, and metabolic diseases.

Weber State University

Faculty and Research
  • Daniel Clark - Pathogenesis, interactions, and treatments of various microbes (MRSA, Salmonella, the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri, malaria, herpes simplex virus) using microbiology and cell culture techniques with bioinformatics.
  • Michele Culumber -  Microbes in contaminated groundwater, Hawaiian soils, Peat Bogs, The Great Salt Lake, and cheddar cheese.

Other Contributors and Research

Clemson University: The Sonoco Institute of Packaging Design and Graphics

New Mexico State University: Chemical & Materials Engineering

North Carolina State University: Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences

Purdue University: College of Agriculture