16 Oct 2013
The Delivery of Functionality in Complex Food Systems conference took place from 30 September - 3 October in Haifa, Israel, A J Banks bursar Anna Schuch reports.
Attending the conference gave me the opportunity to present parts of my PhD work in an oral presentation. The title of my talk was 'Delivery of bioactives in water-in-oil-in-water (W/O/W) double emulsions: structural changes during processing, storage and digestion'. It was part of the 'Engineering lipid-based delivery systems' conference session.
I presented my recent work on the production of W/O/W emulsions and the instabilities occurring during the process. I also showed some results from former colleague about the stability of these emulsions during digestion. At the end of the presentation I received some constructive feedback from several professors and post docs as well as from people from industry.
The conference gave me the chance to listen to interesting presentations from well-known professors like Erich Windhab (Zurich, Switzerland), José M Aguilera (Santiago, Chile), Raffaele Mezzenga (Zurich, Switzerland) and Alejandro Marangoni (Guelph, Canada). Their talks covered different topics concerning the functionality of complex food systems, and gave me new insights into other research topics, and further ideas for my own work.
During the coffee breaks and poster sessions I was able to talk to some of these outstanding researchers. The discussion about my results has given me further motivation for future work. I am about to publish my results soon and the discussions and questions helped me to decide on a structure. In addition I have to start writing my PhD thesis soon, and I am sure that the interest shown in my work will motivate me for the writing process.
I had some interesting discussions with other researchers which gave me a deeper insight into different research topics. I also heard some results which are relevant to some of my colleagues, and was able to pass on details and contacts to them.
I also met a professor whose PhD student will come and visit our institute for some experimental research soon. This enabled to build on the cooperation between my institute and the professor's.
Attending this event enabled me to present and discuss the work of my PhD research with a number of others. I met a lot of people from around the world who were working on food products and the delivery of functionality through their structure. I made some excellent contacts which I hope to use in my future career.
Anna Schuch
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
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