BAE Ph.D. candidate Kaitlyn Casulli earns USDA NIFA predoctoral fellowship
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EmailCasulli is one of just 57 students nationwide and one of three Spartans to receive the award.
Kaitlyn Casulli, a a Ph.D. candidate in the Michigan State University (MSU) Department of Biosystems and Agriculture Engineering (BAE), is one of 57 students nationwide and one of three Spartans conducting research under faculty in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources to be awarded a predoctoral fellowship from the U.S. Department of Agricultural National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA).
Casulli is studying how dry roasting peanuts can reduce pathogens, such as Salmonella, to better understand the risk of contracting foodborne illness.
Kirk Dolan, professor in BAE and the MSU Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, is one of Casulli's advisors, along with Donald Schaffner, professor of food science at Rutgers University. Bhler, Inc., an industrial solution provider for food and mobility, and one of their customers, Mana Nutrition, are serving as commercial testing sites.
We are currently getting a better idea of the rates at which pathogens can be reduced in dry foods, but we are missing the link between what we are doing at the lab scale and what is happening at the commercial scale, Casulli said. We are able to tightly control lab-scale roasting experiments and measure multiple variables with relative ease, but commercial-scale roasters are essentially a black box. We verify their ability to produce a uniformly safe product based on inputs and outputs, without real-time tracking of what's happening to a product when it's roasted in a potentially variable process.
She focuses on examining impacts of thermal variability on pathogen reduction, with a particular emphasis on producing a safe peanut-based product to address malnutrition in developing countries.
While foodborne illness in a developed nation most often looks like being sick for a little while (think a 24-hour bug), in a developing nation for an already malnourished person, the health consequences can be much greater, she said. We need to balance providing a severe enough heat treatment to reduce foodborne illness risk, while not heating the product to the point of destroying nutrients.
Casulli said it's an honor to receive federal recognition for her research, and she's excited to see where it takes her.
Beyond this recognition, I am excited for the chance to begin creating a body of work that is uniquely my own, an opportunity not often presented to Ph.D. students who work on projects their advisors conceived, she said. This fellowship will also afford me the opportunity to broaden my perspectives beyond the lab, such that I may be better prepared to address societal challenges in future research and mentoring opportunities.
