The Future of Food-Live Webinar was held on Tuesday, Feb. 25, and was hosted by the SUNY Oswego chemistry club counting down to the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22.
The webinar was held in Shineman Center and worked to demonstrate how the chemistry community is working to address some of the major food related problems that humanity is facing. With the mutual understanding that food is a common denominator in issues like health, sustainability, global warming, poverty and inequality, the webinar presented the research of three experts who used different methods to combat these problems.
Daniela Barile, a certified chemist and professor at The University of California, Davis, spoke about how she is working to combat these issues with her research program focusing on milk functional glycomics, the study of all glycan structures of a given cell type or organism. Her interests are in combining an understanding of the chemical and biological properties of food with analytics and engineering to characterize and make use of all parts of food so that there is regulation in food waste and in addition, helping the environment.
“The new information that I learned was about the oligosaccharides that we’re getting from different kinds of food byproducts,” Julia Koeppe, a biochemistry professor at Oswego State, said.
Another expert who presented their research at the webinar was Ricardo San Martin who is the research director of the Alternative Meat Program at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at The University of California, Berkeley.
The Alternative Meat Program allows students to explore entrepreneurial opportunities in alternatives to animal meat which can be difficult as it is not yet discovered what gives meat its particular umami flavor which can differ between meats.
The last expert who displayed their research was Selena Wang whose research program focuses on chemical quality, purity and nutritional boundaries that occur during fruit and vegetable post-harvesting, processing and storage.
Her lab works on identifying the important chemical markers that are important for quality, purity and nutrition. She also works on developing faster and cheaper detection methods that can be easily adopted by food industries to modify the processing methods to improve food quality.
As the advisor of the chemistry club at Oswego State, Kristin Gublo, the instructional support advisement coordinator, said that “very little effort is needed to plan an event like this.”
“For the past few years, we have signed up for all of them. Topics differ each time, I thought the topic for this one would be a popular one.”
For Maria Mendoza, a biochemistry major at Oswego State, it was a potential interest in the field and her courses that brought her to this event.
“I want to either go into food chemistry or forensic chemistry,” Mendoza said.
As for Gublo, she hopes that students gain knowledge about the topic, become more familiar with their professional organization, the American Chemical Society and make some new friends.
Photo by Eurokah Sejour | The Oswegonian
