A general interest in human food perception and attitudes. My research program tends to focus on consumer attitudes towards food texture and texture perception itself. This line of research involves everything from simple surveys to tracking the jaw motion of people as they consume foods. My research also seeks to better understand how we discriminate odors from one another. Humans are exposed to odors constantly in their daily lives and these odors are almost exclusively in the forms a mixture of smell active compounds. Interestingly, our brains ignore some differences between odors as to simplify our perception of the outside world. For example, no two apples smell exactly alike, but our brain packages these differences into the concept of an ‘apple’. I am interested in understanding what level of change needs to take place in an odor mixture before people notice. We are using a wine aroma in my lab to test several different facets of human odor discrimination. Lastly I am interested in improving methods for sensory & consumer science researchers.