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SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

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    Saphwan Al-Assaf

    Director, Hydrocolloids Research Centre, University of Chester, UK
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    Janine Higgins

    CCTSI, NORC, University of Colorado School of Medicine, USA
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    Prof. Shaodong Guo

    Department of Nutrition, Texas A&M University, USA
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    M Bajaj-Elliott

    Great Ormond Street Hospital, University College London, UK
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    Giorgia Sarais

    University of Cagliari, Italy

Saphwan Al-Assaf

Director, Hydrocolloids Research Centre, University of Chester

UK

Professor Al-Assaf graduated in 1988 with a first-class degree in Chemistry (Mosul University). He gained his MSc (1994) and PhD (1997) from Salford University in the field of radiation and solution properties of hyaluronan and cross-linked form (Hylan). Subsequently he took up a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Glyndwr University Wrexham (formally North East Wales Institute of Higher Education, NEWI) working on the characterisation and modification of hydrocolloids. He moved to Chester University in August 2015 to lead the Hydrocolloid Research Centre at the Institute of Food Science & Innovation.  Professor Al-Assaf has secured research funding from various industrial collaborators and has published over 100 papers. Professor Al-Assaf serves on the editorial board of a number of Journals and acts an associate editor for the Journal of Future Foods.

Janine Higgins

CCTSI, NORC, University of Colorado School of Medicine

USA

I am a Professor of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, and a graduate of the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program. I received my PhD in biochemistry at the University of Sydney and have spent the last 23 years conducting translational nutrition and metabolism research in rodent models, children, and adults at the University of Colorado. I am passionate about every stage of research, from basic to community services research, and committed to the personal and professional development of staff, Fellows, and Faculty at all career stages. My overarching career goal is to create and grow infrastructure that facilitates research excellence and an outstanding training environment.

Prof. Shaodong Guo

Department of Nutrition, Texas A&M University

USA

Shaodong Guo, Ph.D. is Professor in the Department of Nutrition at Texas A&M University (TAMU), College Station, Texas, USA. He received Ph.D in Physiology from Peking University, China, and completed his postdoctoral medical research trainings at Harvard University. He was an early pioneer in finding Foxo1 in insulin signaling in control of gene expression. Dr. Guo served as senior editor for the Journal of Endocrinology and Journal of Molecular Endocrinology, and editorial board member for Diabetes. His lab research focuses on hormonal signal transduction and insulin resistance, aiming at understanding disease mechanisms and dietary and therapeutic interventions on diabetes and its complications. Working on the gene transcriptional regulation of metabolic homeostasis by insulin receptor substrate proteins (IRS) and the forkhead/winged transcription factor FoxO1, he been funded by American Diabetes Association (ADA), American Heart Association, and the National Institutes of Health of USA for decades. He is the recipient of ADA junior faculty award, career development award, ADA Research Excellence Richard R. Lee Award (2015), and TAMU presidential impact award (2021). His work has been published in numbers of journals including the JBC, Diabetes, Endocrinology, Hypertension, Circulation Research, AJP, MCB, and Nature Medicine, receiving more than 10,000 citations from the Google Scholar with h factor 45.

M Bajaj-Elliott

Great Ormond Street Hospital, University College London

UK

Dr M Bajaj-Elliott is an Associate Professor at Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London. Her major research interest is to better understand how commensals versus pathogens interact with the paediatric gut in health and in clinical settings. The team recently reported the impact of gut microbiome fluctuations on clinical outcomes in allo-HSCT. Importantly, the study identified enteral nutrition associated with improved outcomes (https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-022-01270-7).

Giorgia Sarais

University of Cagliari

Italy

Giorgia Sarais is an associate professor in Food Chemistry (CHIM/10, 03/D1) at the University of Cagliari since 23/12/2019. She obtained her PhD in Pathology and Environmental Toxicology in 2007 at the University of Cagliari, and from 2011 she was a researcher in Food Chemistry (CHIM/10) at the University of Cagliari.
She carries out her teaching activity for Pharmacy on Chemical Toxicological Analysis and Analysis of Drugs 1 undergraduate students. Since 2020, she has been a member of the Biomedical Sciences PhD program’s teaching staff committee at the University of Sassari. Her technical expertise includes methods to study food safety and quality, focusing on nutritional, toxicological and process innovation aspects. The primary interest deals with the valorization of traditional Sardinian food products (wine, aromatic plants and their derivatives, olive oil), their food waste and by-products, with particular attention to metabolites that show antioxidant and nutraceutical properties (phenols, carotenoids, etc).
Health benefits and sustainable extraction methods have been evaluated for plant food-derived bioactive components. Informative metabolomic analyses by LC-MS-QTOF, LC/MS/MS, HPLC, GC/MS, and ICP techniques have focused on identifying and quantifying targeted or untargeted metabolites to obtain sample intrinsic information for their competitiveness and innovation. Her research activity, carried out in collaboration with public institutes (European Universities, CNR), national and international research groups, and private companies, has been financed by competitive funding. Prof. Sarais has been part of several research projects and is the author of 66 papers in peer-reviewed international journals with impact factor on ISI and Scopus (author h-index = 22 and citation n° = 1489, Scopus 10/04/2025), and co-authored 3 book chapters.

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