Relating Food Structure to Sensory Perception: Addressing Global Obesity Challenges

Recent public health concerns about food-linked diseases, such as obesity have raised considerable challenges to design healthier foods with a focus on designing reduced-fat or fat-free foods that are sensorially appealing. Furthermore, to directly promote weight management in population, there is an immense need for designing such foods with satiety-enhancing properties that terminate appetite for longer periods after consumption. Therefore, these two PhD students will be joining a dynamic and multidisciplinary research team of postdocs and other PhD Students at Sarkar Lab, unravelling exciting science behind creating sensorially stimulating and satiety-enhancing foods using hydrogels as model foods.

This project will establish fundamental understanding on the impact of microstructural, rheological, tribological aspects of gels (as model foods) during oral processing using in vitro methods and relate with sensory perceptions. During the PhD, the student would collaborate with a academics in School of Psychology and will receive training on using a variety of instrumental colloidal techniques (rheometer, tribometer, confocal microscopy, light scattering), sensory trials (trained and untrained panel. statistics) and soft skills (e.g. oral/ poster presentations at national and international conferences, writing research papers).