June 2010 – May 2011

BSysE Grad Students Win Travel Award

Four Food Engineering graduate students, Fermin Resurreccion, Ofero Caparino, Roopesh Sayamaladevi, and Sumeet Dhawan received a travel award of $1250 from Puget Sound Institute of Food Technologists (PSIFT) to attend the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) annual meeting and International Microwave Power Institute (IMPI) symposium to be held in New Orleans in June 2011. A reception to recognize all the scholarship recipients will take place in Meridian Valley Country Club Kent, Wa on May 10, 2011.

May 5, 2011

Dr. Don McCool Retirement

Dr. Don McCool has worked for the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) for the past 49 years and is now moving on to his retirement.  During his 40 years located in the Biological Systems Engineering Department,  Dr. McCool has been part of our “BSysE family” and has worked with many faculty, staff and students.

Please help us celebrate this new adventure in Don’s life.  A retirement reception will be held at the Quality Inn in Pullman on May 17th from 3-5pm.  Coffee, punch and cake will be served and a short presentation will take place at 4pm.  Cards or letters to share with Don are welcome.  We hope you can join us for this celebration with Don, his family and friends.

If you would like to contribute to a gift for Don, please send your donation to Joan Hagedorn, at the Biological Systems Engineering Department.

May 4, 2011

Dr. Denny Davis Retirement

Dr. Denny Davis, former BSysE Chair and faculty member, retires at this semester’s end. Thursday, May 5, there will be a retirement reception for himi at the ERTL (Engineering Teaching Research Lab just west of DANA) building from 3:00pm to 5:00pm on the third floor. Dr. Davis succeded Dr. Ralph Cavalieri as chair and was himself succeded by Dr. Claudio Stöckle,our current chair.

May 2, 2011

Poster Presentation and Awards

The BSysE512 graduate students poster competition on Apr 25 was a success thanks to the dedicated participation of our BSysE512 students and the many others who helped. A special thank you goes to BSysE for providing the refreshments. Dr’s. Jimmy Tang, Manuel Garcia, and Frank Younce attended the event and presided over the winners announcement; Roger Nelson spent hours and hours helping the students prepare their posters and in setting up LJSmith 259 for the presentation.Dr. Dun, Dongjie Shen, and Mariana Dobre, in Pullman, helped me teach this class from Puyallup; helped especially with the evening labs, and with grading the assignments. The BSysE512 Poster Competition winners are:

  • 3rd Place: Liana Suryaningsih (Horticulture, Pullman campus)
  • 2nd Place: Jesus Alberto Garcia-Nunez (BSysE, Pullman campus)
  • 1st Place: Meng W ang (BSysE, Prosser campus)

The winners will receive cash awards in the amount of $35, $50, and $75, respectively. Congratulations to Liana, Jesus, and Meng, and all our BSysE512 students for your good work!

May 2, 2011

Visiting Students

We have two visiting scholars joining us from The Netherlands.  Joram Boegborn and Jeroen de Graaf are both students at the University of Twente at Enschede, The Netherlands.  They will be working with Manuel Garcia-Perez through July 31.

Three visiting students have arrived this past week. They will be working with Dr. Gustavo Barbosa-Canovas

Maria Boluda Aguilar, a Ph.D. student at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena in Spain.  She has B.S. and M.S. degrees in agricultural engineering from the same university.  She will be here for about a month and a half conducting collaborative research on advanced manufacturing technologies for rice meals.

Amaury Taboada Rodriguez is a Ph.D. student at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena and at the University of Murcia in Spain.  He earned an M.S. degree in nematology at the Faculty of Science of the University of Ghent in Belgium and a B.S. degree in biology at the University of Havana in Cuba.  He will be here for about a month and a half conducting collaborative research on inactivation of spoilage microorganisms in liquid food products using thermal and nonthermal technologies.

Sandra Zapata is a Ph.D. student at the Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia and innovation vice president for Ecoflora SAS, a Colombian company developing products for pet care and cosmetics from plants growing in Colombia.  She has a B.S. degree from a university in Colombia and is working toward a master’s degree at the same time that she is pursuing a Ph.D.  She will be here until October conducting collaborative research on the development of powder-based extracts of plants for use as coloring agents. (25Apr2011)

Forging Research Links with China

Dr. Shulin Chen and Dr. Juming Tang are part of a WSU delegation that visits China each year to find new research partners and this year to complete hiring of the first WSU China Officer. Their goal is create partnerships with research students, faculty, and business and to promote the strengths of WSU. (14Apr2011)

Visiting Faculty

Ms. Youjia Chen is a Visiting Scientist from the China Agricultural University, Beijing China. She arrived in February and she will be with our program for two years. Youjia will be working on modeling partitioning in corn and visualization of crop modeling outputs. (16Mar2011)

Mr.Farhad Saberali is a Visiting Scientist from Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran. He arrived in March and he will be with our program for 6 months.  Farhad will be working on modeling dry been cropping systems, especially competition with weeds. (16Mar2011)

Feb 2011

Microwave Sterilization and Pasteurization

The work of Dr. Juming Tang is featured in two publications this month. One, a news article describes the growing commercial value of Microwave Heating and Sterilization Technology, and the other, “Advances in Mirowave Pasteurization and Sterilization” in the February issue of Food-Technology (member logon), gives a the history, problems encountered, advances, and successes in this exciting field of research.

Jan 27, 2011

Fruits of Peace

Dr. Gerrit Hoogenboom, Director of AgWeathernet and Professor of Agrometeorology, was recently featured along with other members of the ‘NATO Science for Peace Project’ in the Republic of Georgia in a EUROnews web broadcast of the NATO Chronicle story on water management in the Republic of Georgia: “The fruits of Peace”.

Sumeet Dhawan wins IFT 2010 Student Competition

BSysE Doctoral student Sumeet Dhawan has won first place in the food packaging division of the Institute of Food Technologists’ (IFT) 2010 Graduate Student Paper Award Competition.

Conducted under the supervision of Shyam S. Sablani, professor of Biological Systems Engineering, Dhawan’s research focuses on developing high performance polymeric based nanocomposite and nanocoated multi layer structures for advanced thermal food processing technologies, like microwave sterilization and pressure assisted thermal processing. This research holds the potential of developing high quality sterilized foods with shelf life beyond a year.

The title of Dhawan’s presentation was “Morphological and Oxygen Barrier Changes of Two Multi layer Polymeric Films subjected to Microwave Sterilization.”

This work is funded by a U.S. Department of Agriculture food security special research grant, “Developing innovative packaging for advanced processing technologies to insure the integrity and safety of processed foods.” Dhawan’s committee members include professors Gustavo V. Barbosa Cànovas and Juming Tang. (WSUToday)  (10Sep2010)