Dr. Helene Hopfer, Rasmussen Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor of Food Science, holds a B.S. and M.S. in Polymer Science & Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry. She completed a postdoctoral stay at UC Davis where her research focused on factors affecting sensory and chemical properties of wines. She worked for the vegetable seed company HM.Clause to develop a sensory-assisted breeding pipeline, before she joined the Department of Food Science at Penn State in 2016.
Her research focuses on the human-food interface, and how food composition and food structure affect human perception and food choice, particularly, aroma and flavor. Combining human sensory and consumer science with analytical chemistry, instrumental analysis, and multivariate statistics, research activities in the Hopfer lab focus on three areas: (i) Utilizing Sensory Mixture Effects for Improving Foods; (ii) Linking Human Perception to Plant Genetics for Improved Flavor; and (iii) Measuring Quality and Understanding Differences in Quality Perception. Dr. Hopfer’s work has been published in over 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.