The 2021 Summer Online Lecture Series: Digital Agriculture and Future Food was held online to promote international communication and broaden the sight of students from the College of Biosystem engineering and Food science, due to the severe COVID-19 pandemic prevailing in the world. On July 30th, Dr. Haotian Zheng, a tenure-track assistant professor from the department of food chemistry at North Carolina State University, gave a lecture entitled “On the Road to Understanding and Control of Food structure”. The event was host by professor Hui Zhang’s research assistant Meiyu Chen.

Dr. Zheng’s research interests include: (1) developing novel dairy ingredients, (2) improving food ingredient functionality, (3) food structure design for improved stability, textural attributes, and health benefits of processed foods, and (4) solving real life problems in the food industry. His lecture included most of his recent studies, for example, delicate designs of milk fat globule membrane structures, functional protein structures, and O/W interface using milk phospholipid enriched ingredients. He also spent quite a long time introducing various basic principles of food structure design from a soft matter approach.

Construction of food structures is a complex work for food researchers. It requires careful design from multiple facets, including the use of animal or plant sourced ingredients, the development of different novel processing techniques to achieve ideal functionalities of food ingredients, the application of multi-scale measurement techniques for the studies of colloid properties at bulk or interface, and the techno-functional relationships between food structures and their fate of digestion and absorption both in vitro and in vivo. Existed studies have contributed a lot on this topic, whereas understanding the hidden science and basic principles of food structure design are still on the infancy. Dr. Zheng thus provided a soft matter approach to understand the mesoscale properties of food materials. The formed structures are in jammed states, and are mainly driven by the balance between entropy and enthalpy, which can be further regulated to design mesoscopic smart materials. In one example, Dr. Zheng explained how emulsions stabilized by different mechanisms (surfactant/protein and Pickering particles) can be modulated to achieve different release rate of free fatty acid during digestion. He also provided a case study on how to modify the surface topology of milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) for novel design of phytosome, emulsion droplets, and cheese products.

Apart from research work, Dr. Zheng also shared some advice on how to balance and connect the work between academic research and engineering projects, and encouraged students with no hesitate to generalize research progress at a lab-scale to practical productions in the industry.

After report, Dr. Zheng had a communication and interaction with students regarding questions on understanding the different strategies used when designing food structures using animal or plant source ingredients. Students all showed gratitude to Dr. Zheng’ s kindly sharing of his experience.