Professor Charles Spence is a world-famous experimental psychologist with a specialization in neuroscience-inspired multisensory design. He has worked with many of the world’s largest companies across the globe since establishing the Crossmodal Research Laboratory (CRL) at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University in 1997. Prof. Spence has published over 1,000 academic articles and edited or authored, 15 books including, in 2014, the Prose prize-winning “The perfect meal”, and the international bestseller “Gastrophysics: The new science of eating” (2017; Penguin Viking) - winner of the 2019 Le Grand Prix de la Culture Gastronomique from Académie Internationale de la Gastronomie. His latest book Sensehacking was published in 2021. Much of Prof. Spence’s work focuses on the design of enhanced multisensory food and drink experiences, through collaborations with chefs, baristas, mixologists, chocolatiers, perfumiers, and the food and beverage, and flavour and fragrance industries. Prof. Spence has worked extensively in the world of multisensory experiential wine and coffee and has also worked extensively on the question of how technology will transform our dining/drinking experiences in the future. The research conducted at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory in Oxford has garnered widespread media attention across the globe, and he also has been awarded numerous national and international prizes for scientific excellence, including the 10th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the British Psychology Society: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, and, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany): ‘in recognition of past accomplishments in research and teaching’. In 2008, together with Dr. Max Zampini, he was awarded the 2008 IG Nobel prize for nutrition for his work on ‘the sonic crisp’.

Dr. Ferruh Erdogdu is a full professor of food process engineering at the Ankara University, Turkey. He received his Master of Engineering degree in 1996 and Ph.D. in 2000 at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. His research studies have focused on mathematical modeling – optimization and computation food processing towards the industrial scale thermal processing of food products. He is the founder of the computational food processing group at the Ankara University (CFπ). He was the editor of the Journal of Food Engineering between 2018 and 2020, editorial board member of the Journal of Food Process Engineering since 2003 and associate editor of the International Journal of Food Studies (an ISEKI Journal) between 2012 and 2017. He is currently co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Food Engineering since Jan. 2021. He is the selected member of the ISEKI Academy, professional member of IFT, Science Dissemination & Communication member of the EFFoST and representative of Turkey within the European academy of Food Engineering and International Association of Engineering and Food. He is also one of the active members (scientific committee and acting instructor) of the International School on Modeling and Simulation in Food and Bio-Processes.

Sara González-García obtained her degree in Chemical Engineering at the USC (Spain) in 2005 being awarded with the Extraordinary Prize of End of career in Chemical Engineering. She completed her Doctoral Thesis at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering at the USC in September 2009 with European mention and being awarded with the distinction Cum Laude and Extraordinary Prize. She performed research stays in the Forestry Research Institute of Sweden (4 months, 2007) and the Dept. Industrial Ecology at Leiden (4 months, 2008). She carried out her PhD studies funded by the Spanish National Program FPU fellowship (2006-10). She conquered 2 competitive postdoctoral fellowships granted by the Spanish and Galician Governments to support her research. During this period, she hold positions at the European Forest Institute (2009, 3 months, Finland), the Dept. Life Sciences in the Imperial College of London (2010-11, 1.5 years, UK) and the Dept. Environment and Planning in the University of Aveiro (2012-14, 1.5 years, Portugal). She successfully competed in the Spanish National Program Juan de la Cierva and was ranked in the 1st position in the area of Chemical Technology. In 2015, she competed in the Spanish National Program Ramón y Cajal and was ranked 1st position in the area of Chemical Technology. She started her 5 years senior researcher contract in January 2016 at USC, which represented her consolidation in the Dept. on the Environmental Management LCA research line. In 2012, she carried out a 2 weeks research stay at the School of Engineering - Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile). She carried out research stays at the U. of Aveiro (2018, 2.5 months), at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine-U. of London (2019, 2.5 months) and at the Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) granted by the Jose Castillejo program (2020, 3 months). In November 2016, she received the Young research award Agustin de Betancourt y Molina medal by Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering. From July 2021, she is Associate Professor at the USC. She has been PI of 3 national projects, 1 Galician regional project, 1 project financed by BBVA, 1 PRIMA H2020 project and Co-PI of 1 H2020 project; she has participated in 7 European, 4 national and 8 regional projects. She has participated in 14 research contracts, being PI in one. She has organized the 1st MEDITERRANEAN SYMPOSIUM ON LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT in the 3rd ANQUE-ICCE Int. Congress of Chemical Engineering. She has co-directed 5 doctoral theses: 4 at USC and 1 at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. She is currently co-director of 4 doctoral theses at USC. Author of 156 publications (65 as first author) in JCR journals (92% Q1), 12 book chapters, 5 publications in non-indexed. She has an H44 and a total of 5094 citations (Scopus 03/23).

With an education background in applied physics, Elliot Woolley is currently a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Manufacturing at Loughborough University in the UK. His research interests are in the improvement of process efficiency across the food supply chain and in the reduction of food loss and waste, particularly at the household level. He has developed novel clean-in-place optimisation technologies (through multiple funded projects) which are now being developed for applications in reusable food packaging via a £1m project funded by Natural Environment Research Council. During his career he has been involved in over 30 project consortia working across industry, academia and NGOs and has published extensively in high impact journals in the field of sustainability, food and production engineering. He has served as guest editor several times for the MDPI journal Sustainability, for the Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering (Springer) and is currently on the editorial board of Cambridge Prisms: Plastics. Elliot has also been developing capabilities in resource efficiency led manufacturing level decision making, leading a grand challenge project in the £5.2m EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Industrial Sustainability and as a Co-Investigator in the prestigious £4.5m 5-year EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Food.

Ulrike van der Schaaf is a research group leader and KIT Associate Fellow in Food Colloids at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In 2016, she received her PhD (summa cum laude) in Food Process Engineering at the same university. Before, Ulrike spent 6 months in the Food Chemistry Department at the University of Copenhagen and 3 months in the Food Process Engineering Group of Wageningen University and Research Centre. For her research, Ulrike received several prizes, amongst others the Julius Maggi Award 2016 (2nd Place) of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering Section of Food, the KaTe Award 2017 of the KaTech GmbH and recently the Glyn O. Philips Award of the Food Hydrocolloids Trust. Her research interests are hydrocolloid emulsifiers, the structuring of food emulsions and gels and sustainable alternatives to synthetic polymers.