November 10, 2014
Plant-based food properties expert to speak Dec. 2
The grain science and industry department will host plant-based food properties expert Mike Gidley for a public lecture at 3 p.m. Dec. 2 in the Hemisphere Room in Hale Library. Refreshments and seating begin at 2:30 p.m.
Gidley is a professor, director of the Centre for Nutrition and Food Sciences at Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation and chief investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
He obtained his Bachelor of Science Honours in chemistry at the University of London in 1977 and his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Cambridge in 1982.
Before establishing Centre for Nutrition and Food Sciences in 2003, Gidley worked for Unilever Research in the U.K. for more than 20 years, beginning as a research scientist and culminating as the group leader for plant-based foods and ingredients.
Gidley's major research interest is the linking of plant molecular structures to macroscopic properties with relevance to plant-based food properties. In particular, Gidley is interested in investigating polysaccharide assemblies such as plant cell walls and starch granules, particularly the way these structures are assembled in nature and then disassembled during manufacturing and later during digestion. Gidley's field of research involves the use of spectroscopic, microscopic and materials analyses of natural materials and model systems. Insights into structure-property relationships are obtained and can then be used to provide targets for raw materials and processes with enhanced food and nutritional properties.