Institute: Institute of Materials

Strategic R&D&I cluster: Agrupación Estratégica en Gestión y Producción sostenible de Biorrecursos (BioReDes)

Area: Food Technology

Research group: Sensory analysis, nutritional assessment and development of novel foods

Email: patricialopez.sanchez@usc.es

Doctor by the Chalmers University of Technology with the thesis Microstructure and rheological properties of plant particle suspensions prepared using different physical treatments 2011. Supervised by Dr. Maud Langton, Dr. Stephan Schumm.

Dr. Patricia Lopez-Sanchez joined the Food Technology area in the Department of Analytical Chemistry, Nutrition and Food Science as a Ramón y Cajal researcher in May 2022. Dr. Lopez-Sanchez has developed her career in industry and R+D centers. She worked as a corporate researcher at Unilever R&D, the Netherlands (2003-2011); postdoctoral researcher The University of Queensland, Australia (2012-2016); postdoctoral researcher Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences SLU, Uppsala, Sweden (2016); senior researcher and food materials science leader at Research Institutes of Sweden RISE (2017-2020); senior researcher/associate professor (docent) at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden (2020-2022). Her research interests focuses on the relationship between the structure (at different scales) and the technofunctional and nutritional properties of molecules derived from plants and algae, such as polysaccharides (dietary fiber) and proteins. The knowledge generated about structural properties is used to design food ingredients and products with improved sensory (texture, taste) and nutritional properties, as well as biomaterials. Her field of research involves the use of spectroscopic, microscopic and rheology analyses.