Food WG 1 and WG 5 member, LINXS Fellow

Patricia Lopez-Sanchez is associate professor (docent) in food structure/function and researcher at the Department of Food and Nutrition Science at Chalmers University of Technology. Her formal qualifications include a MSc in chemistry (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) and PhD in food science and technology from Chalmers University. Her research experience includes eight years as corporate scientist at Unilever R&D (The Netherlands), and four years as postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Nutrition and Food Science at The University of Queensland (Australia). Her major research interest addresses the need to ensure food security, and to produce more sustainable, healthy and functional foods, using a material science approach. The underlying hypothesis is that cell walls and wall polysaccharides, which determine microstructure and physicochemical properties during manufacturing and under physiological conditions, are key to improve our exploitation of plants. Her expertise includes the use of microscopic, spectroscopic, and material analysis techniques to understand the complex and hierarchical structure of food ingredients and products.