Elke Scholten

Session 3: Beyond cook 'n' look - mechanistic approaches to food structure design

Dr. Elke Scholtenis an Associate Professor in the group of Physics and Physical Chemistry of Foods at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She studied Physical Chemistry at Utrecht University, after which she obtained her PhD from Wageningen University in the area of Food Technology. She then spend two years as a post-doctoral associate at MIT (USA) in the department of Chemical Engineering, one year at AKZO Nobel, after which she re-joined Wageningen University in 2009.

Her research group focusses on food structuring approaches with a variety of food grade materials to change characteristics in a variety of foods systems, including gels, emulsion-filled gels and emulsions using dairy and plant-based ingredients. She aims to unravel relationships between the structure of food systems to the mechanical properties, lubrication properties and sensory perception of such foods using a combination of rheology, tribology, and microscopy techniques. This knowledge is used to provide new guidelines for the reformulation of foods, such as fat reduction, ingredient flexibility, and the design of plant-based foods.