Q: What is your current position and what type of work do you do?
A: Since three years ago, I have been chair professor under the Shanghai 1000 Talents Program in the Department of Food Science and Technology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Before that, I was at the University of Hong Kong for 24 years. My work is typical for a research-focused grain academic, I think. We have a big team of faculty, postdocs, and research students from China and around the world in the Functional Grains Innovation Lab. The Chinese system is very competitive, and to get into Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the students have to be extremely smart and hardworking. The students and postdocs do the work, and I support them and make sure they have the resources and guidance that they need. Most of my work is reading, editing, writing, teaching courses, and traveling to meetings and conferences. I don’t get a chance to do hands-on work in the lab.
Q: When and how did you first decide you wanted to work in cereal grain science?
A: I left high school wanting to be a maize breeder, so clearly I decided early on that cereals were for me. I grew up in Zimbabwe, and agriculture was considered important and prestigious, so I was influenced by that. I worked in breeding of sunflower and maize and then obtained a master’s degree from Guelph related to maize breeding. My shift to cereal chemistry started in my Ph.D. program in plant genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where I worked on genetics of protein quality in wild barley with Dr. Dan Atsmon. My final exit from field-oriented breeding or genetics came when I took an AACC International short course in Fargo, ND, directed by Dr. Bert D’Appolonio, on Experimental Baking and Dough Rheology. That course showed me that cereal science had a lot of nice instruments to use, a lot of interesting problems to investigate, and was populated by nice people. When I started an independent faculty position at the University of Hong Kong in 1992, I decided to focus on starch, on wheat, and, as something a little different, on Amaranthus.
Q: How have you been involved with the Cereals & Grains Association? How has your involvement with the association enriched your career?
A: I have been involved in the AACCI — Cereals & Grains Association since 1992, when I took that short course in Fargo. I was the international director on the AACCI Board of Directors in 1998 and later initiated an Asian Products short course that was held in Baltimore, MD. I invited various AACCI short courses to Hong Kong, such as Dr. Carl Hoseney’s Frozen Dough course, which was a big success. I have published many papers in Cereal Chemistry. My priority conference every year, whenever possible, is the AACCI — Cereals & Grains Annual Meeting.
The association has been tremendously beneficial to my career. At my first AACCI Annual Meeting I met Dr. Shaoxian Yue from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He sent me my first Ph.D. student from China, Dr. Huaixiang Wu, to work on Amaranthus. Through AACCI — Cereals & Grains conferences I met all the Australian grain scientists, such as Drs. Lindsay O’Brien, Graham Crosbie, and Vicky Solah, who have collaborated with me on Australia–China wheat quality research over many years. With Rod Booth’s support and enthusiasm, my lab in Hong Kong was the first to obtain, and to very extensively use, the RVA instrument. For me, the Cereals & Grains Association is “just right” as a scientific society—it is big enough, focused enough, and international enough to provide top-quality scientific cooperation, yet in an informal and friendly way. To mention Fargo again, another of my first Ph.D. graduates from Hong Kong, Dr. Monisha Bhattacharya, became a tenured associate professor in the Department of Cereal Science at NDSU.
Q: In 2019, Cereal Foods World (CFW) has focused on the Global Food System (GFS). Please offer your perspective on how global societal and technology trends are affecting grain science and the grain industry overall? How will grain scientists need to adapt to these global trends?
A: Well, there are several current big issues facing grain producers, researchers, and consumers alike:
- How to achieve sustainable production and quality under climate change and continued population pressures, particularly in tropical Asia?
- The trend towards reduced meat consumption for environmental, health, and ethical reasons. Chinese policy is to reduce per capita meat consumption over the coming years. And, we all hear how much excitement there is about plant-based meat substitutes and the start-up companies that are achieving success in this area.
- The Chinese Belt and Road development initiative has interesting consequences for grain production, and agriculture in general. With better means of communication, including road, rail, and shipping, mostly from China heading west, there is scope for development of new markets for quality grains.
- The gut microbiota is another hot trend in food and nutrition research. The relationships among microbiota, grains, grain bioactive constituents, and processing methods, such as fermentation, are immensely complex and demand multidisciplinary research solutions.
Grain scientists need to identify problems and deploy all the advances in instrumentation, genomic technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), computation, etc., to tackle problems. These days, team-based and interdisciplinary work is essential to contribute meaningfully to finding solutions to big problems. Grain scientists should be best placed to identify, understand, and articulate problems and to build teams.
Q: This issue of CFW explores Innovation and Product Development, from farm to fork, in the context of the GFS. Do you have any perspectives on the challenges and opportunities associated with the global expansion of the food chain and the dynamics of the global food trade?
A: I think that understanding consumer markets in very important. Clear understanding of consumer needs helps to drive product development that can be flexible enough to serve niche markets. An interesting way to start is to collect information about local traditional products that are in danger of disappearing as old skills die out. By understanding these products, we can redesign them for large-scale production and adapt them for nutritional or other needs. Another issue is always the development of mutual understanding between producers and buyers about grain quality requirements. I think that many of our methods for definition and analysis of grain quality have fallen behind the needs of modern industry. For example, we don’t even have a simple, reliable way to define and test for noodle quality.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: With all the problems facing global grain production—sustainability, quality, and human health—grain science is more important and interesting than ever. I will continue with my research, teaching, and industry outreach activities. I think that the best contribution we can make as academics is in training the flow of new graduates who will solve the problems of the future.
