Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

NC1023 Annual Meeting Minutes (Prepared by Kumar Mallikarjunan, Secretary) University of Tennessee, October 13-14, 2008 Attendance: Mark Morgan (IN, chair), Gustavo Barbosa-Canovas (WA), Kumar Mallikarjunan (VA, secretary), Lester Wilson (IA, Steering Committee Chair), Graciela Pauda (IL, vice chair), Hongda Chen (USDA-CSREES), Fred Payne (KY), Haiqiang Chen (DE), Soojin Jun (HI), Kirk Dolan (MI), Brad Marks, Steve Ingham (WI), Fernanda San Martin, John Kirby (Adm. Advisor), Kayanush Aryana, V.M. Balasubramaniam, Sudhir Sastry (OH), Arthur Teixeira (FL), Federica Harte (TN), Swamy Anantheswaran (PA), Dennis R. Heldman, Mukund Karwe (NJ), Kasi Muthukumarappan (SD), Tameshia Ballard, Christina Sabliov (LA), Stephanie Jung, Y. Martin Lo (MD), Roger Ruan (MN), Ashim Datta (NY), Kathryn McCarthy (CA), Michele Perchanok (NASA), Vineet Rakesh, Amit Halder, J. Antonio Torres (OR), Q. Zhang (Host), Michael Davidson. October 12 (Sunday): Dinner at Hong Kong House Restaurant and Various ad-hoc committees and the Steering Committee met in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Select. October 13 (Monday): Meeting started with the welcome address by Joe DiPietro, President of University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture. He explained the structure of the Institute and its four missions. He also explained that the university structure and in their University structure, Colleges and Deans are replaced by Institutes and Presidents. The associate deans are now Vice-Presidents in the institutes. His speech was followed by introductions of the participants. Hongda Chen gave the report from USDA-CSREES. Dr. Hongda Chen discussed about the changes coming to the USDA agency as the results of Farm Bill 2008. The Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics will hold the title of Chief Scientist of USDA. This change should significantly increase the visibility of Research, Education and Extension. The Under Secretarys office will establish a new Research, Education and Extension Office (REEO). The new office will have six divisions: Plant health, production and plant products; Animal health, production and animal products; Food safety, nutrition and health; Renewable energy, natural resource and environment; Agricultural systems and technology; Agricultural economics and rural communities. Effective October 1, 2009, National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will replace CSREES. The new NIFA director will be appointed by the President for a six year term with a second six year term possible. This politically appointed director will report directly to the USDA Secretary or the Secretarys designee. The new competitive research program Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) has replaced the NRI and IFAFS programs effective October 1, 2008. The AFRI program will require a matching for commodity based research projects. The AFRI program announcement will be posted on the agency website by November 30, 2008. The RFA will come around mid January of 2009 with a proposal deadline of at least 30 days after the RFA. The NC-1023 may present multistate research ideas initiated from its ad-hoc committees to the NPLs for the consideration of a Coordinated Agriculture Project (CAP) program. Finally, Hongda reported that Dr. Denny Heldman has been appointed by the Under Secretary for REE, Dr. Gale Buchanan, to serve as a new member of National Agricultural Research, Extension, Education and Economics Advisory Board (NAREEEAB). The Boards primary responsibility is to review policy and provide consulting to the Secretary and land grant institutions, as well as provide expertise to House and Senate committees related to agriculture and forestry. Multi-state project administrative advisor John Kirby discussed the mid-term review of NC-1023 and shared the recommendations from the reviewers of the program to the group. He emphasized on the collaborative activities and specifically to document such collaborative activities. He acknowledged that there are many such activities are happening within the group but with a lack of documentation, it appears as disjointed groups to the reviewers. He mentioned that as the reason for the reviewers recommendation to split the group into three or four new projects. However, the group unanimously agreed not to split the NC-1023 group and look forward to working on the rewrite in the coming year. During the discussion Swamy Anantheswaran raised the lack of additional funding for collaborative activities within the group. Hongda Chen and John Kirby suggested looking for funding through CAP program. Hongda added that the projects have to be multi-disciplinary (not just food engineers) as USDA plans to support many multi-state funding that of multi-disciplinary in nature. John also emphasized the importance of outreach and many participants with an extension appointment need to make sure their time is allocated appropriately by their station directors. After the discussions it was concluded that the group will go forward with the write-up for renewal of the group and will try to address the issues mentioned in the mid-term review accordingly. Specifically the participants will list/describe the both formal and informal collaborations between stations. It was agreed that during the individual station reports, emphasis will be on collaborative activities. Each station gave the report for 10 minutes, with an exception of California and New York. They split their 20 minutes between themselves with 15 minutes for California and 5 minutes for New York. Additional 5 minutes was given to the collaborative effort between New York and Tennessee which was presented by Michel Davidson from University of Tennessee. TN and NY developed a software program to evaluate the inactivation of pathogens by various cooking methods. CA and NY worked on MRI mapping of thermal and moisture transfer during combination microwave + convection cooking and subsequent mathematical modeling of the process. Report from Delaware Station was presented by Haiqiang Chen and described the work related to high pressure processing on viruses and antimicrobial packaging. He expressed interest to work with high pressure ad-hoc committee. Mukund Karwe mentioned that Rutgers has a new faculty member who could work on the packaging work with Delaware. Art Teixeira mentioned about his Food Physics book and requested collaboration from the group on working with the issues of shoulder and tailing effect of pathogen inactivation during dynamic thermal processing. Representative from Hawaii (Soojin Jun) described his research program and asked for collaborations in nanoscience and thermal processing. He is currently working on a book related to food process modeling and mentioned that he is already working with many of the members of this group. Lester Wilson (Iowa station) reported many collaborations including high pressure processing with Nebraska; Soymilk with Illinois; Soymilk and Tofu with North Dakota and their interaction with NASA, Illinois and Texas on work related to effect of irradiation on food quality during Mars Mission. Iowa expressed willingness to collaborate on the influence of food processing and storage on food quality, safety, and composition. Graciela Pauda described the work from Illinois station and expressed willingness to work on packaging with nanoparticles. Mark Morgan (Indiana) introduced two new faculty members in their department who would be contributing to this group and he described the collaborative work between CA and OH on the development of Virtual Laboratories in Food Processing. Fred Payne (Kentucky) presented his work on evaluating enzymes used for cheese making using optical backscattering method. Christina Sabliov described the efforts of Louisiana Station on continuous microwave processing and microwave assisted extraction with Maryland and Purdue. Martin Lo presented the reports from Maryland. He worked with LSU on Chinese wolfberry hydrolosates and with UT on xantham-chitosan complex gels. Both Kirk Dolan and Brad Marks presented for Michigan Station. Kirk described his work on parameter estimation techniques and inverse problems and expressed interest in collaboration from anyone doing modeling and parameter estimation. Brad described his work on modeling heat and mass transfer with marinated meat cooking and was seeking collaboration related to quantifying sources of uncertainty in predictive microbial models. Roger Ruan described his research on concentrated high intensity electric field application in non-thermal liquid food pasteurization and currently he is the only one working in this area and would like to collaborate with others. NASA (Michele Perchonok) will be working on process development related to the Mars mission and seek collaborations on studying the effect of irradiation and novel processing methods. Ohio (Sudhir Sastry) completed a research project along with VT on developing sterilization methods for space mission and also worked with NJ, WA, CA and NC on projects funded by CAPPS, USDA NIFSI (safety of foods), USDA CSREES (quality kinetics). Based upon last years NC-1023 meeting, Ohio and Iowa are working on a grant submission to AFRI on a food engineering approach to produce safe fresh fruits and vegetables. For Oregon, Antonio Torres described the projects related to high pressure processing and expressed eagerness to work on collaborative projects related to high pressure processing. Swamy Anantheswaran described recently completed projects from Pennsylvania station and asked the group to increase attention on the tailing phenomenon in pathogen inactivation by high pressure processing and expressed interest to work in this area with others. Muthu described the recent activities (sonication and ozone treatment) that he is continuing after his sabbatical from University of Ireland. For Tennessee station, Federico Harte summarized the activities happening in their group: improving whey protein functionality using supercritical CO2 and minimal processing of fresh produce using dense CO2 and high pressure homogenization. The work on fresh produce is in collaboration with North Carolina and some work on high pressure homogenization is with Nebraska. Kumar Mallikarjunan presented the work from Virginia and described the collaborations with Tennessee, USDA-ARS and PA. He requested input and collaboration on computational modeling of structural changes in food during high pressure processing. Washington state has worked in collaboration with others related high pressure processing and microwave processing. Gustavo Barbosa-Canovas mentioned his recent research work related to ultrasound in yogurt processing. The station reports were completed with the presentation from Wisconsin by Steve Ingham. For Wisconsin, he explained the work from the groups and appreciated his opportunity to be here. October 14, 2008 Ad-hoc committee reports from Modeling, nanoscience and high pressure were given be respective chairs of these committees (Ashim Datta, Graciela Pauda and Antonio Torres). Modeling ad-hoc has developed a Wiki site. Wiki sites allow for collaboration and widely available. It is being proposed to move the current Wiki from Cornell University to Wikipedia. The committee wanted to continue and want to show impact and the new deadline for the members to update and add new models is December 15-th. HPP ad-hoc is planning unfunded work to develop protocol templates for pathogen work and publication on experimental tips. The group will seek CAP program or similar funding opportunities and if funded standardization of HPP process will be pursued. The protocol development will be spear headed by Mukund Karwe and Bala Balasubramaniam. Identification and selection of suitable enzyme for inactivation studies will be addressed by Stephanie Jung and the identification and selection of pathogen work will be lead by Antonio Torres. Others in the group include Kumar Mallikarjunan, Swamy Anantheeswaran and Haiqiang Chen. Nanosci group organized a nanosci conference through IFT (June 27-28, 2008) and other one is with AIChE  Christina Sabliov and Qixin Zhang organized these symposiums. The group is gaining momentum in designing nanoparticles, novel encapsulation and integrating this to processing. Nanotech for health and wellness will be the focus of this ad-hoc committee. Based on the response to the request to list collaborations (both current and future), the compiled list was presented to members and highlights include: many members would like to work in high pressure processing; increased interest to work in phyto-chemicals extraction and encapsulation; interest to share strategies to teach food engineering to food science students. As an example of the importance of our station reports on October 13, a new collaborative project has been initiated between the Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, and NASA Stations to evaluate the influence of low dose and high dose gamma irradiation on the activity of rennet (used in cheese manufacture). New ad-hoc committee to work on teaching food engineering principles was proposed due to overwhelming interest from many new faculty members in the group. Mark Morgan will take the lead to formulate the activities for the group. Anyone interested are encouraged to communicate with Mark. Steering committee report was delivered by Lester Wilson. He emphasized the importance of documentation (both formal and informal activities) reports for all collaboration efforts. All members are in favor to go forward for next 5 years. John Kirby added to the discussion: The expectations are different now. Objectives and ad-hoc committee structure must align with each other. There should be integration in the project objectives and outcomes. It looks more like NCAC (meeting of department heads). Lack of comfort is based on the feeling that it is from amorphous large group with lack of coordination. The renewal will go to NCAC and the department heads will review this proposal and will be reviewed by the station directors. Strong outreach component is required and integrated into the research (what you are doing). Rewrite The title for the group will be changed and the current agreed title is: Engineering for food safety and quality. Kumar Mallikarjunan will take the lead on coordinating various subgroups in the rewrite process. The steering committee will work on Mission and Vision for the project and the preamble for the project. Following were agreed to be the objectives for the project with current objectives moved to strategies: 1) Advancing technologies (thermal, physical (HPP, Ultrasound), electro, sensing, packaging, nanotech, electro (microwave, PEF, Ohmic), etc) to ensure safety and improve quality of food products: Bala will take lead for this objective. 2) To develop mathematical models as a tool to ensure food safety and enhance food quality: Ashim and Kathryn will take lead for this objective. 3) Develop learning modules for teaching engineering principles: Mark, Federico will take lead for this objective. 4) Dissemination of information to stakeholders (need for every year?) : Martin Lo will take lead for this objective along with other members having extension appointments Outcomes from last five years: Steering committee, Lester Publications: Fernanda will collect the publications from all stations. The publications with more than one station produced in collaboration will be highlighted. Kumar will send an email to Christine Hamilton (letter of intent by Sept 2009) and she will give the precise deadlines and milestones for submission of the rewrite. Next meeting will be in Texas and the group decided to have the meeting along with NASA Johnson Space Center. As several members do not have U.S. Citizenship, it was decided to have the meeting in Houston with a short tour of the research facilities in NASA. Bala Balasubramaniam of Ohio State University was elected unanimously as the secretary. He will serve as the secretary in the next meeting (2009). The following meeting 2010 will be hosted by South Dakota. Tentatively the next few meetings were planned as: 2011  Hawaii and 2012  Wisconsin. Suggestion for future meeting format: List station activities; highlight collaboration/impact, describe only one project in detail and bring the scientific issue for discussion. In regarding to seeking collaborations, members express their needs ahead of the meeting so as to identify collaborations early and reserve time to discuss collaboration. Another suggestion was to include a Keynote talk (subject theme during Lunch/Dinner). Meeting adjourned on time (11:30 a.m.).

Developed a software program to evaluate the inactivation of pathogens by various cooking methods. The extensive data in the software include many different food products and a wide range of food borne pathogenic bacteria. Published a book titled "Food Physics" on physical properties of food products. A Wikipedia-like website has been developed to describe various mathematical modeling approaches to describe food process operations. Organized a nanosci conference through Insitute of Food Technologists (June 27-28, 2008) and another symposium with American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Published more than 300 journal referreed papers, and conference presentations.