For Women in Science is a global program that honours female scientists, promotes their work and empower them to act as role models among women in scientific research - as well as attract more women to study science. The prize is a grant of DKK 110,000 for the recipients' research.

Laura Roman Rivas, a Spanish native, is a postdoc on a grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation at the Department of Food, is among the three female researchers in Denmark who will receive the award on 23 September.

In her fundamental research, Laura Roman Rivas aims at creating a foundation for understanding how the new plant-based foods of the future can become sustainable and as nutritious as possible for humans.

She focuses her work at creating new knowledge about how complex structures are formed between plant proteins and starch during processing, which is crucial for the development of new and improved foods and thus help to exploit the full potentials of plant materials. She will do this through physico-chemical studies of interactions between protein and starch in complex forms of biopolymers.

Her work lies at the interface between molecular structures and physical chemistry of biomaterials, with the overall goal to understand the mechanisms that lead to the interactions between plant-based proteins and starch.

The consequences of the molecular interactions between these biopolymers during processing are critical for the development of new and improved foods.

Contact:

Postdoc Laura Roman Rivas,
Department of Food,
Aarhus University
E-mail: lroman@food.au.dk
Mobile: +45 2231 7098