Food Processing and Unit Operations
How transport phenomena — fluid handling, heat transfer, pumping and separation — determine product quality and process stability in food manufacturing.
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My research interests sit where food processing meets the systems that govern it. Industrial experience in edible-oil manufacturing gave me a concrete set of questions about how processing conditions determine product quality; postgraduate study and subsequent work on Codex standards and food-trade policy gave me the framework in which those questions are answered at national and international scale.
Themes
How transport phenomena — fluid handling, heat transfer, pumping and separation — determine product quality and process stability in food manufacturing.
Palm-oil based products including cooking oil, margarine, cocoa butter substitutes and shortening: processing routes, functional properties and quality control.
Risk analysis and the development of Codex Alimentarius standards, including how international standards are negotiated regionally and applied in national systems.
The relationship between trade policy and food security outcomes, and how policy instruments support or undermine nutritional goals.
Sustainable production, climate resilience and nutritional advancement as intersecting constraints on the future of food supply.
Research philosophy
I am drawn to research questions that begin as production or policy problems: why a fat crystallises the way it does, how a safety standard translates into a control point, what a trade rule means for a small producer. Research of that kind has to be rigorous to be useful, and useful to be worth doing.
The UQ Summer Research Program taught me the part of research that is rarely on a syllabus. Experiments did not go to plan and results were not what I expected, and the useful lesson was that setbacks are information rather than obstacles — a habit of mind I now try to build in students as much as in my own work.
In progress
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Research in progress will appear here with its question, methods, role and expected outputs.
Completed
Independent research undertaken through the UQ Summer Research Program, a competitive university scheme that admitted 385 of 930 applicants. Add the project title, supervisor and research question.
Capability
[ADD INFORMATION]List the analytical, laboratory, statistical and qualitative methods you are competent in — instrumentation, software, sensory methods or statistical techniques.
Relevance
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