Congratulations to Dr CHAN Mei Zhi Alcine (supervised by Assoc. Prof. LIU Shao Quan) and PhD student WANG Xiang (supervised by Prof. HUANG Dejian) for receiving the 2022 FST Outstanding Graduate Researcher Award. This annual award is given to PhD students or recent PhD graduates who demonstrated excellence in their research work during their postgraduate study at FST.
About Alcine’s research
Alcine has recently graduated from the PhD programme in April 2022. Her PhD research focused on creating a novel probiotic-fermented coffee beverage, where she exploited different probiotics and media formulation to enable survival of probiotics with good success. The research findings were published in six reviews and articles belonging to SCI-Indexed journals (Trends in Food Science and Technology, Current Opinion in Food Science, International Journal of Food Microbiology, and Food Research International). The discoveries were also patented and currently serves as the technical foundation for the NUS spin-off, Curated Culture, to enhance consumer accessibility to the probiotic coffee. At present, Alcine is a Research Fellow at NUS FST and she is leveraging upon her fermentation research expertise to cultivate protein-rich microalgae in food side-streams.
About Wang Xiang’s research
Wang Xiang’s PhD research explores anti-inflammatory activities of edible natural products in a 3D macrophage model that she developed. The 3D model overcomes the limitations of the traditional 2D cultured cell model, which tends to lead to false positive results as the behaviour could not fully represent the in vivo conditions. Wang Xiang made use of the 3D model to study anti-inflammatory activities of two novel flavones, providing valuable scientific evidence on their application in chronic inflammatory diseases. Throughout Wang Xiang’s PhD studies at NUS FST, she has published 4 papers on her primary research in reputable journals (ACS Applied Bio Materials, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, and Foods).