Corinna Dawid

Corinna Dawid, Chair of Food Chemistry and Molecular Sensory Science, Technical University of Munich, Germany 

Prof. Dr. Corinna Dawid is professor for Functional Phytometabolomics, deputy head of the Chair of Food Chemistry and Molecular Sensory Science and deputy director of the Bavarian Centre for Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. After her studies of food chemistry at the University of Münster, and her PhD and Postdoc phase in the group of Prof. Dr. Thomas Hofmann at TUM School of Life Sciences she performed a research stay at the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, where she was instrumental in establishing the Institute for Molecular Sensor Technology. Back in Munich, she began her habilitation. After the appointment of Hofmann as President of the TUM, she took over the provisional leadership of the Chair of Food Chemistry and Molecular Sensory Science. Since 2023, she additionally holds the professorship for Functional Phytometabolomics at TUM.

"SENSOMICS a useful tool to discover molecular targets for flavor innovations"

The development of safe and at the same time healthier food products, for example, reduced in fat, sugar, or salt, are well-known to induce nonacceptable flavor defects in those products and has, thus, created unexpected flavor challenges for the food industry. In response to the consumers’ demand for high quality foods and baverages, novel ingredient discovery, including plant-based proteins and its ferments, as well as the understanding of flavor codes of both the „golden standard“ and off-flavor samples is inalienable.

The presentation will highlight metabolomics-based strategies to identify key taste active and modulating compounds in processed foodstuffs by means of the so-called Sensomics approach. This technique enables the re-engineering of the combinatorial codes of odor/taste-active and taste modulating biomolecules, which can be used as “molecular blueprints” to monitor process-induced changes in chemosensory profiles from plant to fork, to control breeding and post-harvest processing parameters towards the development of preferred flavor signatures.