The Final Leg(s)

By: Maurice

Friday April 23th and the PhD trip is almost over. To celebrate the end of this trip we had a very nice party yesterday in the basement of the hostel, with lots of beer, chips and pool-balls. Because a number of people stayed up very late it took a while for everyone to get out of their beds and assemble downstairs for our departure. After Anja and Elsbeth collected all the keycards and checked us out, we said goodbye to Nirmal, Francisco, Martha and Thomas who would stay in the US for a week more.
The ride to the airport was short and handing over our rental cars was not difficult either. So with still a lot of time to go we took the shuttletrain to the terminal. Until so far everything went very smoothly, but then ...
At arrival at the check-in counters we tried to check in with no success, except for Lena, but she had a place on a later flight. The rest of us made a queue to the counter and we waited for our turn. Norhan and Rianna also had to go on that same flight as Lena. The other 14 of our group however could not be found in the system. Tension was increasing, but thanks to a very, very helpful lady behind the counter and a lot of telephone calls and waiting she found out what happened. Our original KLM flight was canceled and replaced by a Delta flight. This meant new eticket numbers, but these new numbers had not been relayed to us. Remko contacted our travelagency in Holland and after a lot of waiting and more calling we could make everybody have happy faces again. OK we were not sitting as a group like on the flight in, but we at least had seats. Unfortunately Norhan, Lena and Rianne had to take a flight at 2200 instead of our 1830 flight. Thankfully though,we had a very friendly, persistent and patient lady at the Delta Airlines desk who helped us. We didn't have any stroopwafels left, so instead we gave her a one of our booklets.
We spent the final hours before boarding with a little shopping, some food and again a lot of waiting.
Around 1800 we finally started boarding and it was kind of sad and ironic to see that there were still a number of seats empty, seats that could easily have been filled by Rianna, Norhan and Lena.
Everyone was boarded and right on schedule we left the gate for the runway, and there we stayed. First the captain told us there was a minor 'incident' with one of the passengers. Then, a couple of minutes later, he asked if there was a doctor in the plane. A very cliche thing to say in a plane, but for us the passengers a little worrying. Two people went to the front and a after a while the captain announced that there was a small child with chickenpox on the plane and that we were returning to the gate. The captain didn't want to take the risk of infecting other passengers on this 7 hours flight. Our return to the gate caused a lot of panic under the passengers, because a large portion of the plane were people who had been stranded in the US and had to take connecting flights in Amsterdam. The captain calmed everyone by saying that this flight would continue and that only the sick child with his family had to go off the plane and that after refueling and removing their luggage we would continue. In the end that was a little over two hours later that we took off form the runway of JFK. The cabin-crew tried their best to keep morale high by making jokes and distributing our diner right away. Especially the joke about us making a detour to Iceland and sacrificing a number of passengers and crew to the volcano to appease the volcano-gods got a lot of laughter from the plane.
The rest of the flight went by quite fast. Some of us were able to sleep a little, but for the others it was quite hard to sleep in the small chairs. Around 9:30 we could see the coastline, a sight which was greeted with a lot of joy and happiness. We landed around 10 o'clock and at 10:30 we left the arrivals-hall of Schiphol. Our group got smaller and smaller, first we had to leave people at the hostel, then a couple more at JFK and at Schiphol everyone went their own way and it was just me, Anja and my wife in the train to Ede-Wageningen. We lost the rest of the people going by train somewhere at Schiphol and we managed to take a different train.PhD-Trip 2010 was done. It was a great experience, we had a lot of fun, a lot of interesting experiences,a lot of new information and a lot of stress, but in the end only we will only remember the happy things.

Up to the PhD-Trip 2012!

DSM and National Starch

by: Nicolas Hardt

The last day of our trip before travelling home to Europe was also the busiest one. Early in the morning at 6am we left NYC to travel to Belvidere, NJ to visit DSM. The Dutch State Mines (DSM) were found over 100 years ago and used to be a Dutch government-owned coal mining company. In these days, the company is positioned differently with a strong focus on creating products and services in Life Science and Material Science. These products are typically found in the motor, food, and electronic industry. At the site of DSM nutrition, which we visited today, several vitamins and arachidonic acid (a polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid which can be found in breast milk) are produced for the food industry. These vitamins can e.g. be used as a food supplement. In several and sometimes deafening process steps, which allowed no conversation and caused us to wear earplugs, the vitamins are manufactured using chemicals, enzymes, and/or microorganisms. The site of DSM was also the only place we visited during our PhD trip which only had a production plant and no R&D going on. Finally, during our well organized stay at DSM Nutrition we were informed that the DSM list price of 100% of the recommended daily intake (RDI) of all vitamins is about 1.2 dollar cents. The next time you are thinking about buying any kind of vitamin supplements you might want to keep this in mind.

In the afternoon, after lunch, our very last visit led us to National Starch in Bridgewater, NJ a subsidiary of AkzoNobel. National Starch is the global market leader in the development manufacturing and sales of speciality starches, employing over 2,250 people in 36 countries. National Starch mainly focuses on food ingredients (e.g. for McDonalds, Kraft, Aldi), papermaking, and biomaterial, such as biodegradable plastics. After a nice welcome presentation we had the chance to see a site pilot plant and different laboratories where the focus is set on research on starch. Afterwards, Elsbeth, Jimmy, Anja, and Abid were giving their last presentations before we were heading back to NYC.

In the evening, we concluded our very extensive and interesting, but also very exhausting PhD trip with a final little get-together at the hostel.

Finally, I want to say thank you to the PhD committee consisting of Anja, Elsbeth, Francisco, and Maurice. Thanks for the great organisation!

Unilever Skin Care Research

By: Maurice

Today we were expected at the Unilever Skin Care Research center in Trumbull, CT. Our visit was not going to start until 12:30, and it was only about 1,5 hours of travel. Therefore everybody was really happy they could stay in bed a little longer. The faces of all the participants were not looking that tired anymore after a long night of sleep. Well most of the people had some much needed sleep, some people took the opportunity to stay out later than the previous day.

We left around 10 o'clock and thankfully the traffic was not very heavy and we managed to arrive before noon. We arrived at a nice modern looking building and we were welcomed by our contact person who is also one of the leaders of the R&D center Badro Ahtchi. The welcome was very friendly and we even started with a visit to the well stocked cafeteria for an excellent lunch.

Badro started the session with an interesting presentation about Unilever, it's history, market-position and other general information. He went into more detail with some slides about past innovations like the role of glycerol in soap and it's affect on the wetting and penetration of the soap. Another innovation he mentioned was the Pureit system which brings cheap clean water to places like India where safe water is hard to get. He finished his presentation with some information about all kinds of career opportunities for students, PhD's and post-docs within the Unilever corporation.

Remko followed as the next presenter with his presentation about our group and the research we do. Thomas was next and he did a good job talking about his project on droplet-coalescence. His presentation generated some questions from the Unilever audience. Martijntje was up next and she also did an excellent job talking about some complicated modeling work that she is working on. Nirmal had the job to finish the presentations of the day. He talked about the development of the Ideal Cascade System which he is working on. This presentation also generated a lot of questions among the Unilever employees that were present.
After giving the presents to show our appreciation for the hospitality we went on a short tour around the pilot-facility. They showed us clean and spacious facilities that they use for research and development. Amongst those was a very impressive pilot-scale reactor which is used for improvement of the synthesis of a special surfactant that only Unilever uses. This surfactant is specific for their Dove soapbars and very special. To finish the tour we all received a bar of this soap and so everybody will smell really nice when we travel to our next visit.

The way back to the hostel was troubled by several trafficjams and we arrived back around 19:00. Time for some diner and for the second time Anja and Elsbeth took it upon themselves to feed a large portion of the group. Mjam, Mjam....

Princeton University

By Norhan Nady

Today, we went to Princeton University which is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey. It was founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, as the College of New Jersey. It was moved to Newark in 1747, then to Princeton in 1756 and was renamed Princeton University in 1896.
We visited Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department in School of Engineering and applied Sciences.
In the first session, Prof. Howard .A. Stone gave an overview of his group and the current research topics which focus on dynamics of complex fluids (i.e. Fluid dynamics and transport processes, Microfluids, and Colloidal Sciences are the main three research phases in group of Stone). Then, three different members of the group presented their research topics.
“Behaviors of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa on interfaces” was presented by Yi Shen. She tries to find out how these rod-shape bacteria behave on the surfaces and which interface they prefer to attach; liquid-liquid or liquid-solid interface. This research is a step to study biofilm formation in channel flows. “Microfluidic Magnetic Bead Sorting” was presented by Scott S.H. Tsai. His target is immunomagnetic cell separation by applying magnetic field on the stream. “High-strain and high-strain rate behaviors in materials” was presented by Matthieu Roché. He studies flow-induced phase transitions in complex fluids and stimuli- responsive materials such as anisotropic swelling in rubber material. One of interesting result in this research is that he found fluid that behaves like solid under high shear rate.

After a short break with small individual discussion, we had a lab tour. Autoclaves, incubator, spectrophotometer, fluorescence and confocal microscopes and other facilities are available in both bio- and general labs. Then, we had lunch with group of Stone which gave another valuable chance for individual discussion between the members of the two groups.

The second session started with the introduction presentation by Prof. Remko Boom followed by presentation by five members of Food Process Engineering department. Thomas Krebs presented how he tries to investigate the kinetics of droplet coalescence under compressional stresses of the same magnitude as caused by a typical swirl element. Elsbeth van der Zalm presented her research on shear-induced wheat flour separation which based on rheological differences of major constituents. Abid Maan, Francisco, and Xin who did presentation in the previous universities also re-presented their researches.

The last session in the program was roundtable discussion in many specific points between the both professors and members of both groups.

City College of New York (CCNY) and New York University (NYU) Visit April, 19

Our day tour started with visit to City College of New York. CCNY School of Engineering was one of the first public institutions of its kind, and is still the only public school of engineering in New York City. It is also a flagship PhD granting college within the City University of New York. It is located on North Manhattan. We have visited the group of Jeffrey Morris which includes six faculty who focus on: Colloids, polymers, gels, emulsions, grains and powders and network systems. Their goal is to understand why and how are multiphase mixtures truly different from single component flows.

The first session started with the introduction presentations by Remko Boom and Jeffrey Morris, and those were followed by the presentations given by PhD students from WUR. Yvette presented her project which focus on Deterministic Ratchet Technology for Regeneration of Dilute Waste Water Suspensions. Anna and Martijntje presented experimental and modelling aspects in mild fractionation of emulsions and suspensions. From CCNY side, Sandeep Kulkarni gave a presentation about Dense Suspension Flows, while Ehssan Nazockdast presented Microstructural Theory of Sheared Suspensions. The session was concluded with presentation given by Xiujuan Cao about Colloidal Silica Gelation Dynamics.

This visit ended with the lab tour. Microfluidics, Rheometry and Complex-fluids labs were visited. There is no doubt that the short time for discussion during the breaks will be followed through new made contacts.

We have continued our journey visiting New York University. The University is located on Broadway. We have visited the Department of Physics & Centre for Soft Matter Research and group of David Grier. The meeting was kicked off with Remko’s presentation about Food Process Enineering Group and David’s welcome note. This introduction part was followed Ruud’s talk about Fractination of Food Suspensions Using Microfluidic Devices and Kashif`s focus on Electrostatic Spraying.

David Grier also presented their work done on Optical Forces Arising From Phase Gradients. Ke Xiao, graduate student from NYU presented his work about Prismatic Optical Fractination with Optical Trap Arrays. This was followed by talk about Holographic Video Microscopy given by another PhD fellow, Fook Chiong Cheong.

The last item on the program was also the lab tour.

To conclude, we have been received with great hospitality on both locations and the day ended with wine and “fromaggio” at the department hall of NYU.

Written by: Vukasin Draganovic

Ithaca and Cornell University

By: Nicolas Hardt

Today we went to 30,000 people big Ithaca, NY, 4 driving hours west of Boston and New York City, to visit Cornell University.

Up on the top of the city you can find the scenic campus of Cornell University. C.U. is a member of the Ivy League and can refer to 41 Nobel Prize winners that have been affiliated with the university as alumni or faculty members. With its 13,000 undergraduate and 6,000 graduate students the university is strongly known for its research in the areas of medicine, engineering, and agriculture and life sciences. On our trip, C.U. is also the only university besides UMass that occupies a department exclusively focussing on life sciences.

Quite early and well rested, after having a rich and balanced breakfast we arrived at the university to be very cordially welcomed by Daniel Aneshansley, Kathryn Boor, and Ashim Datta, all professors of the Biological & Environmental Engineering Department introducing their department. The department aims on transparency in the food science program. Therefore, a new building for the department will be shortly built to reflect this goal.

PhD students of our group as well as Ashim Dattas group obtained the possibility to introduce their subjects. Besides Anna, Nanik, Francisco, and Marta, who got to present again, Xin and Lena were giving their first presentations for WUR. Xin was giving an overview on her PhD project on modelling the optimal treatment design of drying of healthy foods, such as broccoli. Lena introduced her PhD subject on the separation of bioactive compounds (polyphenol) out of a waste product of soya milk production (okara) in a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly way.

The focus of Ashim Dattas group in the Biological & Environmental Engineering Department is primarily on computer aided food process engineering, food safety and quality production, and highly intelligent food processing machines (e.g. combine microwave & convective heating). This was reflected by the presentations given by the Cornell group about “Development of a raw milk assay to predict shelf-life of pasteurized milk” (M.Ranieri), “A numerical approach for predicting volumetric inactivation of food borne pathogens by Pulsed Light treatment” (L.Hsu), “Multiphase transport and deformation in food materials” (A.Dhall), “Taking care of garbage in outer space: The use of a closed-loop heat pump drying system for cabin trash on long duration space missions” (A.Arquiza), and “Micro-total analysis systems for pathogenic organisms” (J.Connelly). The visit at C.U. concluded in a visit of several labs of the host.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The next stop on our journey was the group of Georges Belfort at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), which is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking part of the world. After a good sleep and a rather modest breakfast at the motel we drove to the campus in Troy. The walk to the meeting hall took us up the hills across the beautiful RPI campus. We marveled at the historic buildings and the many squirrels.

After a very warm welcome from Prof. Belfort and the head of the Chemical and Biochemical Engineering department, we spent the morning in a symposium listening to and discussing presentations of Phd students from RPI and WUR. We learned about the confinement of enzymes in nanopores changes their properties and how flexible polymers elongate in shear flow, amongst many other topics.

We had lunch in the student union, and after that the program continued with a talk about the history of the institute, which was founded by Stephen van Rensselaer, who was of dutch origin. Prof. Belfort then took us on a tour to visit the labs of the Chemical and Biochemical Engineering institute. The display of experimental techniques was quite impressive, among them an 800 MHz NMR spectrometer. Fortunately nobody had a pacemaker. Other devices included a setup for small angle X-ray scattering for structure determination and a confocal scanning laser microscope. The tour ended with a visit to the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC).

After the tour ended, Prof. Belfort took us to a student bar on campus where we finished the day with a drink. We then went back to the cars for our journey to Ithaca, which would take us 3 hours. The last part of the trip we drove on a dark road through the countryside which invoked memories of American horror movies to some of us. But everybody managed to get to the hotel in Ithaca without getting attacked by werewolves.

April 14th, 2010
University of Massachusetts (UMass), Amherst
By: Rianne Klaver

On the program today was a International Student Symposium about recent advances in Food Science & Technology at the University of Massachusetts.
Seven students from the Food Science group of Julian McClements (UMass) presented their most recent findings and six speakers represented Wageningen University.

The introduction to UMass was given by Prof. Decker. The main goal of this group is to study molecular structures that can be applied in foods and that impact biochemichal pathways. In this way food can be improved in terms of health and wellness. Processes to apply these components in a high valued food that has good taste and convenience and above all is emonomical feasible way, are studied.

A wide variaty of reseach is done in this group. Amongst others Filled Hydrogels by biopolymer phase separation is studied to prevent unsaturated fat from oxidation.
In bulk oils a method was found to delay oxidation. Nanoemulsions were formed by phase inversion by temperature systems. Biosensors to detect pathogens are made.
Active packaging applications are studied. Lung Cancer cell growth is inhibited by bioactive compounds from Orange.

A lot of knowledge was shared and exchanged today. And after a visit to the laboratories we headed of to our next stop. The Super 8 hotel near Ithaca, NY.

Report 13/04/10
Millipore R&D centre
By: Nagesh Wagadare

Welcome by Clifton Nigan (Product development manger, Millipore)

Presentation by Prof. Remko Boom- Introduction about Wageningen University and goal of PhD study report. The research activity of food process engineering group with respect to membrane processing technology was presented.

Presentation by three PhD students from Wageningen

1.Nirmal Patil- Mild isolation and fractionation of biomolecules
It was about membrane cascade technology for downstream processing and separation of biomolecules.
2.Norhan Naddy- Enzymatic modification of polymeric membrane
3.Martijntje Vollebregt - Mild isolation of emulsion and suspension.
A mechanism of particle separation and fractionation by shear induced diffusion was presented. A predictive model was described for efficient separation.


Presentation by Clifton Nigan (Product development manger)
A short history of Millipore was described. The theme of Millipore research is primarily focused on membrane application in life science, filtration, drug discovery development and technology solution for multiple points in manufacturing process. Different innovation in bioreactor, resins, virus filtration was presented.

Lab tour- There was complete tour of lab. We saw different analytical methods related to membrane applications, membrane and module design. An advanced scanning electron microscope for characterization of membrane morphology and plenty of discussion with technician and people for scientific exchange of information. Millipore acknowledged the visit of Wageningen and really looking forward for future research collaborations.

Harvard and MIT, Monday 12th April

It was a bright sunny day. This day we had planned to visit Harvard and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Everybody got up early in the morning and reached the reception desk of the hostel in time. We boarded a bus for horward and reached the “Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences” in time. Maurice and Francisco guided us to the exact location and after a few minutes we were in “Grace Murray Hopper Conference Room”. The programme started with a brief introduction of Harvard research group followed by FPE group of Wageningen University. Remko nicely briefed our hosts about Wageningen city, Wageningen university and on going projects of Food Process Engineering group. The regular presentations started after that, in an alternate sequence with one presentation from Harvard group followed by one presentation from our group. Anne, Nagesh, Jimmy and Kashif represented our group in this meeting. They presented therir projects effectively and satistified their audiences by nicely answering their questions. A short coffee break during these presentations was very helpful to keep us attentive towards the presentations. After presentations 10 minutes were given for general discussion during which we got a chance to talk freely to any person and exchange our business cards. At the end of this session, Elisabeth and Francisco thanked our hosts with some presents (off course, special dutch cookies (stroopwafels)) which we took with us from Netherlands. After general discussion we were taken to visit the laboratories. Labs of Harvard are well furnished with all kinds of fancy instruments regarding microfluidics, rheology, colloidal chemistry etc.

We left Harvard at around 13:00 in the afternoon. Everyone was hungry and the lunch was really a need of the time. We had our lunch from a cafe, took some rest and set out for Chemical Engineering Department of MIT. Mr. Barry S. Johnston was present at the door of the building to welcome us. He took us to the “Warren K. Lewis Conference Room”. Programme started with introduction of the history of MIT during which Prof. Marcus Karel told us about the history of food research at MIT, followed by introduction of Wageningen University and FPE group, by Remko. After this brief introduction there was one presentation from MIT side about the carbonation of foods. Most of our time in MIT was spent on Lab visits. There is a great work going on in the field of emulsification, rheology and biopolymers etc. After thanking our hosts at MIT we were free at around 17:30 in the evening. The drivers had to go to the airports to bring the taxi vans and rest of the people took their way to the hostel.

News Reporter
Abid Aslam Maan

We are here!

On Saturday morning we left right on time from the Biotechnion. Although there were some troubles with checking everyone in, we finally all got on the plane and off we were for the US.A little jetlagged we arrived in Boston and after a small trip with the public transport we finally arrived at our first hostel.
That first evening and night people went for diners in the surrounding area, some even stayed out late to visit a famous jazzclub. Most people however were too tired and went to bed for some well deserved rest.

The next day was a free day for the group and most of the group followed the famous Freedom Trail through Boston Revolutionary history. Fortunately the weather was absolutely gorgeous and at the day a lot of people had very red, sunburned faces.
The good weather also helped the quality of our photographs, of which a lot were taken.