Notables

Food scientist John S. Roberts, an assistant professor at the university's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., received the International Young Food Engineer Award at the Ninth International Conference on Engineering and Food (ICEF) in Montpelier, France, in March. The honor is accorded every three years to a food engineer under 40 years old who has submitted the best paper. Roberts' paper is titled "Understanding the heat and mass transfer of hygroscopic porous materials." His study was praised for providing a better understanding of the mechanisms that control the drying process for foods, timber and textiles, leading to more energy efficient drying processes and higher quality products. His approach to investigating mass transfer during a simultaneous heat and mass transfer process, such as drying, is considered novel in that transient heat transfer is eliminated. Using controlled microwave energy and convective hot air, uniform temperatures are established and maintained at any drying temperature. Uniform temperatures make possible accurate measurements of how moisture migrates through biological materials. "From these accurate measurements, we have been able to impressively predict moisture transfer in biological solid materials, such as potatoes," said Roberts, who also described a model for predicting moisture loss in more-porous materials. "I am delighted that John has received the award," said Chang Y. Lee, chair of the food science and technology department at the Geneva Experiment Station. "He is a young, very energetic, and imaginative scientist. We look forward to his continued success and future scientific contributions to the field."

Lori Lach, an August 2004 Ph.D. graduate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) International Research Fellowship worth approximately $100,000 to study invasive ant species on the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius. Awarded this year to 34 recipients from 25 universities, the NSF fellowships enable young scientists and engineers to spend from three to 24 months at foreign host institutions. Lach will work with John R. Mauremootoo at the Mauritius Wildlife Foundation in LaPreneuse for 19 months, with a three-month stint at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, with May Berenbaum and Andrew Suarez. Partial support for Lach's study comes from the NSF's Biocomplexity in the Environment Program. Findings from this, the first ecological study of ants in Mauritius, are expected to be relevant to conservation biologists in Mauritius and other tropical islands, as well as to the growing field of invasion ecology.