With the interest toward food industry, I chose the major of food science and engineering when I graduated from high school and entered the College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering in China Agriculture University (CAU), the leading university of this field in China. The studies of food science interested me profoundly. Having acquired much knowledge on food, my dream gradually turned to be a professional in the food industry and it is the life and study at the university that bring my dream close to reality. On my senior year, I got the postgraduate recommendation in the same college with excellent record (top 20% among 60 students), which made me directly enter graduate program in the functional dairy laboratory, the national key laboratory in dairy system in China.During the two years in the laboratory, I have done much research work , one was the detection of melamine in milk during the scandals of the illegal addition of melamine in milk in 2009 and another is the mouse-feeding for the purpose of the immunity enhancement based on a strain of lactic acid bacteria.
My latest project is the fermentation of tyrothricin (a kind of antibiotics) and I am writing an English paper entitled "Optimization of the production of tyrothricin by Bacillus brevis with response surface methodology". Thus, my scientific thinking has been solidly and strictly trained in independent research, meanwhile, my innovative spirits greatly improved. Additionally, I received two professional training last year, namely sensory evaluation of dairy product by Professor Clark from Iowa State University and fermented food processing by teachers from Wageningen University. These scientific trainings greatly enriched my experience and skills.
By the course session in my undergraduate and postgraduate study, I came to realize that nutrition plays an important role in strengthening people’s physique, enhancing their immunological functions, and reinforcing health. I also learnt there is more demand now than ever for people to learn the effects and functions of food due to an increased rise in illnesses that are linked to food, for example, obesity, diabetes, malnutrition. I choose to pursue a PhD for discovering a greater understanding of food nutrition for the people and better grasping the interrelationship among food, nutrition and people. Therefore, I can educate and advise the public about food and create suitable dietary information for different groups of people and also to provide concrete scientific explanation.
