Dr. David Honigs
david.honigs@perkinelmer.com
Dr. Honigs did his graduate work under joint supervision of Professor Gary Hieftje and Dr. Tomas Hirschfeld at Indiana University in Bloomington. He served as an Assistant Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Washington for a few years. Following that he worked at NIRSystems (now part of FOSS) on NIR instruments. He started a company, Katrina Inc., which made process NIR instruments. For the last almost 20 years he has worked at Perten (part of Perkin Elmer) on Near Infrared Instrumentation and applications in the food industry. He has 35 research papers listed on ResearchGate.com. He has 10 issued US patents.
Dr. Vincent Baeten
v.baeten@cra.wallonie.be
Dr. Ir. Vincent Baeten is Scientific Director at CRA-W (Walloon Agricultural Research Centre, Belgium) and head of the Quality and Authentication of Products Unit (QAP Unit). This Unit is part of the Knowledge and Valorisation of Agricultural Products Department of CRA-W and has a 43-person staff of researchers and technicians. The QAP Unit is involved in the development and implementation of sustainable practices to reinforce and assess the quality and authentication of agricultural and food products.
Dr. Ir. Vincent Baeten has about 30 years of experience in European projects dealing with the development of spectroscopic methods. He has participated or participates in several European projects dealing with quality, safety, traceability and authentication of food and feed products. Since 2013, he has also been an invited assistant professor at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium). Dr. Ir. Vincent Baeten was awarded the 2011-Q-Interline Sampling Award for the outstanding contribution in sampling applied to spectroscopy methods. In 2012, he was awarded by the Brazilian Program Ciência sem fronteiras as Pezquisador visitante especial at University Federal of Para (UFPA, Belem, Brazil). In 2021, he was awarded the Tomas Hirschfeld Award for his outstanding achievements in Near Infrared spectroscopy. He also takes part as observer to the board of directors of WAGRALIM, the Walloon Agri-food Innovation cluster. As of March 2024, he has published more than 200 scientific papers and book chapters, and his h-index is 41 (Scopus database).
Dr. Marena Manley
mman@sun.ac.za
Marena has been a professor at the Department of Food Science, Stellenbosch University since 2010. Her academic career started at the University in 1997 after completing her PhD at Plymouth University in 1995 and 18 months at the NIR instrument manufacturing company, Foss Electric in the United Kingdom. Marena initiated and implemented research using and applying near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy in research at the University. This was followed by the introduction of NIR hyperspectral imaging research in the mid-2000s. Her research group was one of the firsts to perform such work in South Africa and Africa and to publish cereal NIR hyperspectral imaging investigations internationally.
Marena has supervised more than 70 postgraduate students, published 134 peer-reviewed papers, and contributed to 7 book chapters. In 2019 she collaborated with Phil Williams to publish his ‘Near-Infrared Technology: Getting the Best out of Light’ training course material as a book. Her NIR spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging research still focuses mainly on grain but has more recently extended to also include honey adulteration, sourdough maintenance, chocolate refining and tempering and gummy candy investigations. She finds the use ANOVA-simultaneous component analysis to interpret the effect of controlled factors on spectral data, in full-factorial experimental designs, valuable in these investigations. In December 2022, Marena was awarded a Chancellor’s Award in recognition for her research excellence at Stellenbosch University. Since 2023 she serves on the Board of the South African Academy of Science and Arts.