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Expert is internationally recognized for her expertise in sensory evaluation of food products and associated packaging. She heads the sensory evaluation program at the Employer, which is ranked among the top five sensory science programs in the country. As a member of the Employer's Center for Food Safety and Quality Enhancement, she has directed numerous industry-sponsored projects involving the sensory analysis of food by trained and consumer panels. She has developed and conducted lectures and workshops on sensory evaluation, its application in quality control for management and manufacturing plant personnel. She is the associate scientific editor for the Journal of Food Science.

MILK PACKAGING. Expert has developed alternative packaging systems for fluid milk. She has conducted sensory analysis of skim milk processed by freeze-concentration and other traditional methods. She is developing, formulating, and evaluating flavored (UHT) milk products targeted for young (3-6 years) children.

Expert has vast experience in strategic aspects of product research and development. Since 1984, she has maintained a consumer database of over 4500 households in Atlanta. The database contains information on consumer demographic characteristics, food use and purchase, food-related attitudes, and other food-related information. Her database is used to recruit panelists for research to measure ratings of attributes of food by consumers. These methodologies include focus groups, research guidance tests, surveys, simulated supermarket setting tests, in-home placement tests, and central location tests. The panelists have participated in tests to evaluate fresh and processed (irradiated, dried, pre-cooked, restructured, freeze-concentrated) foods and packaging materials. Expert's research has involved target markets composed of young children, teenagers, the elderly, and the major food shopper in consumer households.


Expert has experience in research involving sensory descriptive analysis and profiling of food, food products, and packaging materials. She has trained several descriptive panels and directed numerous research products involving training and evaluation of various food products and packaging materials by descriptive panels. These panels have quantified food attributes such as color, surface appearance, specific flavors, tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salty), and food texture. She has used these panels in storage- and shelf-studies involving milk, beef, and peanut spreads as well as in claim substantiation research.


Over the course of her career, Expert led several research studies that examined flavor, aromatics, and tastes for a wide variety of food and packaging materials. She has published several studies on flavor profiling using descriptive sensory analysis panels. She has measured flavor volatiles in food (peanut butter, spreads, reheated beef) by headspace analysis using gas chromatography and other chemical indicators of quality and correlated these with sensory analysis results. She is using electronic sensors to evaluate food flavors.

Expert has conducted several studies involving the measurement of textural properties of food. This involved sensory evaluation of hardness, crispness, crunchiness, tenderness, chewiness, adhesiveness, cohesiveness, viscosity, and others. Several of these studies involved simultaneous instrumental measurements (using the instron and Brookfield viscometer) of the physical properties of food for texture profile analysis, Warner-Bratzler and Kramer shear, back-extrusion, cutting, as well as puncture and snapping tests on a wide variety of foods.


Expert has conducted numerous studies resulting in referred journal publications that have focused on sensory or consumer-based optimization of food products. Such studies include modeling of the sensory properties of the food products and optimization of formulations or process variables, or both. Expert uses response surface methodology and regression analysis. She has employed factorial, fractional factorial, and mixture designs in the optimization studies. Her projects have led to development of value-added products, new products, and product improvement or enhancement of existing products. She has extensive international research and development experience in Asia and Egypt.


As a result of her involvement in food research, Expert has published her results in book chapters, refereed journal articles, and numerous technical publications. These include work conducted on animal meats (including beef and chicken), fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy products, composite flour products (snack chips, muffins, noodles), as well as tree and ground nuts. She conducted studies on packaging of fresh produce, beef, and fluid milk. Flexible films, pouches, and paperboard are among the different types of packaging materials she has studied. Expert has conducted workshops on sensory evaluation in quality control for food industry representatives in Manila and Malaysia.


Expert is known internationally as an expert on peanut processing technology and the research and development of value-added products made from peanuts. Her research resulted in the development of product prototypes such as cheese-flavored analogues from peanuts, honey-peanut butter and spreads, non-dairy creamer and whipped topping, and products from composite flours which include peanuts. She also studied the formulation of low-fat spreads from peanuts.


Expert optimized tortilla chips, muffins, snack chips, snack food, and Chinese-style noodles for consumer acceptability and sensory quality using mixture designs and response surface methodology. She determined the effects of each component flour on sensory and product characteristics.


Due to her experience in the industry, Expert has studied restructured beef steaks, pre-cooked steaks and roasts, the effects of reheating (microwave and conventional oven) on "warm-over" flavor of beef and vacuum-packaged pre-cooked beef, the use of surimi in restructured beef roasts, the effect of natural antioxidants in frankfurters, and consumer acceptance of a low-fat, no pork frankfurter. She has conducted extensive studies on irradiated ground beef and chicken. Her recent studies include the development of raw, packaged chicken products from dark chicken meat. She is the author of a chapter on meat cookery in the book "Muscle Foods."


Expert has published several articles on her research on quality measurements of minimally-processed fruit and vegetables. Some of these studies involved the evaluation of post-harvest systems for tomatoes, snap beans, peaches, cantaloupes, honeydew melons, grapes, cucumbers, oranges, green peppers,

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She directed and managed projects on assessing consumer attitudes toward product/package prototypes, advertisements and promotional materials by focus group studies.
She provided consumer insight on new products on the basis of consumer acceptance tests.She conducted shelf-life studies on various foods She moderated focus groups