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

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

Construction of food structures is a complexwork for food researchers. It requires careful design from multiple facets,including the use of animal or plant sourced ingredients, the development ofdifferent novel processing techniques to achieve ideal functionalities of foodingredients, the application of multi-scale measurement techniques for thestudies of colloid properties at bulk or interface, and the techno-functionalrelationships between food structures and their fate of digestion andabsorption both in vitro and in vivo. Existed studies havecontributed a lot on this topic, whereas understanding the hidden science andbasic principles of food structure design are still on the infancy. Dr. Zhengthus provided a soft matter approach to understand the mesoscale properties offood materials. The formed structures are in jammed states, and are mainlydriven by the balance between entropy and enthalpy, which can be furtherregulated to design mesoscopic smart materials. In one example, Dr. Zhengexplained how emulsions stabilized by different mechanisms (surfactant/proteinand Pickering particles) can be modulated to achieve different release rate offree fatty acid during digestion. He also provided a case study on how tomodify the surface topology of milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) for noveldesign of phytosome, emulsion droplets, and cheese products.

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

Afterreport, Dr. Zheng had a communication and interaction with students regardingquestions on understanding the different strategies used when designing foodstructures using animal or plant source ingredients. Students all showedgratitude to Dr. Zheng’ s kindly sharing of his experience.