European Food Engineering Award for Felix Schottroff


Felix Schottroff, Head of BOKU Core Facility Food & Bio Processing and Senior Scientist at the Institute of Food Technology was awarded the 2nd place of the prestigious European Food Engineering Award for his research on electrotechnologies for the inactivation of microorganisms.

The European PhD Workshop on Food Engineering and Technology of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE) took place in form of a webinar on 08-09 June 2021. In the workshop, 11 finalists from whole Europe presented their research. Austria was represented by Felix Schottroff, who is the Head of BOKU Core Facility Food & Bio Processing and Senior Scientist at the Institute of Food Technology.

With his talk entitled Inactivation of microorganisms by electrotechnologies: Tackling engineering challenges for the reliable differentiation of thermal and non-thermal effects, Felix could convince the jury, which consisted of leading professors and industry professionals. For his achievements, he was awarded the 2nd place of the prestigious EFCE Food Engineering Award.

In his research, Felix explores topics on the interface of process engineering and microbiology. He is focusing on the inactivation of microorganisms by electrotechnologies, on a cellular level, as well as on application scenarios and equipment design. The advantage of these technologies is the ability to carry out pasteurization and sterilization processes also for products which are otherwise difficult to thermally process. In some cases, additional non-thermal effects may occur, which allow inactivation of microorganisms even at lower temperatures, therefore causing less degradation of heat-sensitive constituents. In his talk, Felix highlighted the experimental challenges associated with the separation of thermal and non-thermal effects during these treatments.

 

The European PhD Workshop on Food Engineering and Technology is held since 14 years in various European locations and is supported by leading companies from the food industry.


20.06.2021