Awarded First Place was Dr. Michael Saley, a postdoctoral fellow in Chemistry, whose work creates new tools and techniques to uncover how cells communicate with one another—conversations that shape health and disease in ways often hidden from view.

Second Place in the competition was awarded to Dr. Olabisi (Bisi) Akinlabi, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. Her presentation highlighted research examining how vaginal bacterial load and microbiota influence the clearance of human papillomavirus (HPV) and the progression of cervical cancer in Kenyan women. By advancing understanding of the microbiome’s role in HPV persistence and clearance, her work offers potential insights into improved strategies for preventing cervical cancer and related health outcomes.

Third Place in the went to Dr. Asim Joshi, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. Dr. Joshi’s research focuses on understanding why lung tumors often develop resistance to treatment and how this resistance can be overcome. By developing laboratory models and studying the underlying mechanisms, his work aims to identify new therapeutic strategies that could improve treatment effectiveness and patient outcomes.

The People’s Choice Award went to Dr. Mariela Rodríguez, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Nutritional Sciences. Dr. Rodríguez’s research is advancing green technologies for extracting and improving plant proteins—particularly from pulses. Her work focuses on enhancing digestibility, taste, and functionality, with the goal of creating sustainable, high-value food ingredients that can strengthen Manitoba’s agri-food sector.

This competition shines a spotlight on the incredible contributions of our postdoctoral fellows,” said Dr. Kelley Main, Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. “Their research is advancing knowledge in ways that will have a direct impact on our communities. We are proud to celebrate their achievements and the vital role they play in shaping the future”.

This year’s challengers included:

• Dr. Asim Joshi – Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dr. Mariela Rodriguez – Human Nutritional Sciences
• Dr. Masoomeh Gomroki – Food Science
• Dr. Michael Saley – Chemistry
• Dr. Monire Nobahar Ahari – Occupational Therapy
• Dr. Olabisi Akinlabi – Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases
• Dr. Ruchira Nandasiri– Human Nutritional Sciences
• Dr. Taalia Khan – Art and Architectural History

The competition highlighted the important contributions of 8 postdoctoral researchers across varied disciplines, showing how their work is creating real-world impact in Manitoba and beyond.

This competition challenges the presenters to explain their research in just 3 minutes, using only one slide. A panel of 3 judges will evaluate participants on clarity, engagement and impact, while the audience will also have a chance to vote for their favourite presentation both in person and online via the live stream link.

The eight postdoctoral challengers ready to captivate the audience with their three-minute presentation this year are: 

• Daniel Zogona – Food Science, Bioactive compounds in cereals and their potential health benefits. 
• Titus Olukitibi – Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, Immune markers associated with the natural clearance of HPV 
• Kaustav Dey – Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stability analysis of controller hardware-in-loop electro-magnetic transient simulations. 
• Minoo Dabiri Golchin – Occupational Therapy, An overlooked human right: Play 
• Abhay Srivastava – Physiology and Pathophysiology,  Nanotechnology can direct cellular fuel burn and fight inflammation!!! 
• Carmine Slipski – Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases,  Development of a rapid saliva test for detection of oral health
• Illia Roskoshnyi – Law, Legal technological unemployment in the age of AI 
• Nicola Gasparre – Food Science, Green technology for upcycling protein industry co-products into high value food ingredients 

Mark Your Calendars -This competition is open to students, faculty, and members of the public to attend and promises to be both informative and inspiring, offering a rare glimpse into the future of research across multiple disciplines. “This is a great opportunity to learn about the work our postdoctoral fellows are pursing at UM””, says Dr. Kelley Main, dean of the faculty of graduate studies, “I hope to see our community come out to support these students in this competition.”

Location: Bannatyne Campus, Theatre B, Basic Medical Science Building 

Date: September 20, 2024

Time: 1:00pm – 3:00pm 

Please register to attend here: https://forms.office.com/r/h9JXQUMpvv 

New research at the University of Manitoba draws on canola meal protein as a feedstock for biodegradable food product packaging.

“I think it’s a more sustainable solution to the challenges created by all the petroleum-based plastic food packaging materials,” said Thilini Dissanayake, the PhD student whose master’s thesis inspired the project.

Read the full article here

Koksel is the 2021 recipient of the Terry G. Falconer Memorial Rh Institute Foundation Emerging Researcher Award in the Applied Sciences category, in recognition of her accomplishments in bringing Canadian crops from the field to our tables, and in transforming these crops into foods with superb palatability and nutritional value. UM Today caught up with her recently to learn more about her and the research she is undertaking.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your research.

I am a food engineer by training. I have a BSc and MSc degrees in Food Engineering and a PhD in Food Science. My research is at the interface between food science and material science. I mainly focus on processing of cereals, pulses and oilseeds, to make foods including but not limited to bakery products, breakfast cereals, expanded snacks and meat alternatives like vegetarian burger patties to reduce the environmental footprint of the foods that we eat.

My research program also focuses on food physics and involves the use of mechanical and electromagnetic waves to assess food quality. For example, I use ultrasound waves, to test the physical quality attributes of meat alternatives. Consider the manufacture of a plant-based burger patty. The use of sound waves as a non-destructive quality control tool allows me to assess textural attributes of the patty (e.g., its hardness, chewiness, tenderness) in real-time during production. The ultrasonic technique is no contact, so it’s sanitary and producers have immediate control to fine-tune the quality without wasting food.

Why is this research important?

This research is a response to the rising world population. We may not feel it everywhere in Canada, but many in our world are struggling with hunger right now. The question I am asking is, how are we going to feed this growing population? And the answer is, we need much greater access to sustainable, good quality proteins worldwide. Getting all our protein from animals is not sustainable, so we need shift towards more plant-based foods.

What does the Rh Award mean to you?

It’s great to be recognized for the time that we put into our research programs. This award is an acknowledgement from the UM and my peers of the quality of the work that I am doing with my team. It is also tremendous to have a bit of an extra funding that comes with this award, to ensure I can keep my research program going. The recognition it brings to my program is vital; both to me, and to raise awareness of the enormous potential impact of our work.

What do you hope to achieve in the future?

In the near future, I plan to expand my research team, continue to learn and teach, and mentor the next generation of food scientists who are interested in sustainably feeding the growing world population.

In the far future, I hope that my research will help to reduce food insecurity and increase access to nutritious, palatable and high-quality foods all around the world, even at unprecedented times like pandemics or wars.

What about you would people find surprising?

Today my parents live in their home country, Turkey, but I was actually born here in Winnipeg when my father was doing grad school at the University of Manitoba. When I was very young, I moved with them back to Turkey, but I made a full circle and came back to Canada to UM to do my PhD and stayed in Canada.

Any advice for early career researchers and students?

Huge effort goes into producing what we eat and solving critical global problems of food sustainability and hunger is not a trivial task. It requires different disciples to work together. For example, I work with people from many different disciplines including human nutritional sciences, physics and astronomy, chemistry, kinesiology, computer science and biosystems engineering. My advice is to stay curious, be open-minded about different perspectives and remember that even for topics that involve global politics and social sciences, food is always at the core of our daily lives.

You may not associate the physics of ultrasound with a better bowl of noodles, but Page says, “I have been working with Martin Scanlon in the Department of Food Science for almost 20 years, taking the ultrasonic techniques that my group in physics has developed over the years to the characterization of soft food biomaterials such as dough.”

“More recently, we have joined forces with Dave Hatcher at the Grain Research Lab downtown to study the mechanical properties of Asian noodles using ultrasound.”

“My interest is partly fueled because these complex materials have interesting physical properties that we can investigate with ultrasound and I also enjoy the potential relevance of what we are learning for quality control during food processing.”

Page says, “We focus on Asian noodles because of Canada’s very significant wheat export market to Asia for noodle production.”

But what can the scientific properties of ultrasound – high frequency sound waves, at frequencies around 200 kHz, above the range of human hearing – do to help a product you encounter through your sense of taste?

“The techniques that we are developing in this collaborative project use non-contact ultrasonic techniques to measure the mechanical properties of noodle dough during the sheeting process,” which allows for control and optimization of the automated dough production without having to shut down the equipment to make adjustments.

“We measure the speed at which ultrasound travels through the noodle dough, as well as how much the ultrasonic signal is attenuated as it travels through.”

This allows them to measure the texture of the material and look for consistency across the dough during production.

“We can also investigate if the firmness of the dough varies across the noodle sheet at a given stage in the production – such inconsistencies are bad for quality.” The equipment can also measure what influence the number of times it has passed through the rollers during the sheeting process has.

“Flour type and other ingredients that are added to the dough during mixing are also quantities that influence what we can measure, and which are also important for determining noodle quality.”

“The key idea is to measure these mechanical properties at early stages of the production process in order to efficiently monitor and potentially optimize production before the final product has emerged.”

So next time you are slurping your ramen, see if you can taste the physics.