Catherine Renard, PhD, HDR

Dr Catherine Renard is a Director of Research at the at the French National Research Institute for Food, Agricultural and the Environment (INRAE) and Editor-in-Chief of LWT – Food Science & Technology.

At INRAE, she is Head of the Department in charge of partnership for the TRANSFORM division of INRAE, and Director of Carnot Qualiment, a network of the French Food Science research laboratories involved in transfer to industry.

She defended her PhD thesis in 1989 (co-supervision University of Nantes in France and Agricultural University of Wageningen in the Netherlands).

After studying pharmacy and earning a master’s degree in Biological Macromolecules, Physical Chemistry, Dr Renard started working at INRAE in 1986. Her research has focused on the physical-chemical properties of polysaccharides (plant cell walls, pectins) and polyphenols and and their interactions. Her more recent work concerns the impact of fruit and vegetable processing on their qualities, especially those mediated by plant microconstituents, including antioxidants (polyphenols, carotenoids), vitamins (C, B9) and other secondary metabolites (volatile compounds).

She has authored over 250 publications in peer-reviewed journals (h-index 57, in food science, chemistry and plant biochemistry). She has been Editor of LWT – Food Science and Technology since 2010 and convener of Fruit 1 Veg processing I and II (Avignon).

From 2011 to 2018, she headed the UMR Safety and Quality of Plant-based Products (INRA and University of Avignon) where she led the Quality and Processes team from 2006 to 2018.

She was coordinator of the ANR Tempantiox project (2008-2011) Innovative processes to propose processed fruit products with optimized organoleptic and nutritional qualities and of the European project OPTIFEL (FP7, 2013-2017) Optimized Food Products for Elderly Populations.