Ganiyat O. OLATUNDE, PhD
Associate Professor of Food Quality Control and Assurance, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria
Dr. Olatunde is a lecturer and the current Head of Department of Food Science and Technology (FST), College of Food Science and Human Ecology (COLFHEC). Her research activities focused on quality of foods as influenced by a combination of chemical composition of raw materials and processing methods. This is with a view to establish raw material requirements for optimal product quality. She has particularly focused on chemical and nutritional composition, functional properties, and sensory attributes that determine consumer acceptance of food products. She has worked on commodities that Nigeria has a comparative advantage, with respect to production; these include sweetpotato (SP), sorghum, banana & plantain. She has investigated the influence of drying, frying, baking, malting and extrusion on quality of products.
She has supervised or co-supervised B.Sc., M.Sc. and PhD research projects in food science and related fields. She has served as external examiner of M.Sc. and PhD dissertation/thesis for the Department of Food and Consumer Sciences, University of Pretoria. She has taken part in some commissioned projects including the ‘Sweetpotato for Health and Wealth in Nigeria’ project, funded by FMARD/CIP, during which she worked with MSMEs to develop technology and establish quality requirements for baked and fried products, incorporating provitamin A-rich SP varieties. These food products are currently commercialized by private enterprises. She was also involved in the ‘Evaluation and marker-assisted selection of DfID-ARCN-FUNAAB tomato lines for storability’ project funded by TETFUND/DGM. Her research and publications have addressed the multi-faceted dimensions of food quality such as process-oriented, product-oriented and consumer-oriented quality. She is the current Chairman, Western Chapter of Nigerian Institute of Food Science and Technology (NIFST). She is also one of the executive members of Africa Network for Sensory Evaluation Research (ANSWER) and Sensometrics Society.
