Bio
Aoife Gowen is a Professor in the School of Biosystems and Food Engineering at University College Dublin in Ireland. Her research area is multidisciplinary, involving applications of Spectral Imaging and chemometrics to biological systems, including foods, microbes and biomaterials.
After completing her undergraduate degree in Theoretical Physics in 2000, she moved to the highly applied research area of Food Science. Her PhD thesis, completed in 2006, concerned mathematical modeling of food quality parameters and optimization of food process operations. During her time as a post-doctoral researcher and Marie Curie fellow in Dublin and Kobe University Japan she investigated the intersection of near infrared spectroscopy, imaging and chemometrics for characterization of biological systems.
In 2014 she set up the Spectral Imaging research group in UCD and has expanded her team through EU and nationally funded grants, including European Research Council starting and proof of concept grants. She is editor in chief of the Journal of Spectral Imaging and has developed new research-informed modules in spectral imaging and sensors for undergraduate and graduate students.