Leadership

Michael Miller is associate professor in the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC). He received his BS in environmental toxicology from University of California at Davis (1994) and a PhD in food science and environmental toxicology from Michigan State University under the direction of John Linz (2003). He subsequently worked as a post-doctoral scientist at North Carolina State University with Todd Klaenhammer. He joined the faculty at UIUC in 2006 as an assistant professor with a 50% teaching and 50% research appointment and was promoted to associate professor in 2013. Over the past 10+ years, his teaching has been focused on undergraduate and graduate food microbiology courses, where he has consistently been reviewed favorably by his students. He is currently developing a general education course on food fermentation that will be completely online and offered for the first time in fall 2019. In recognition of his service to students, Miller has received several teaching and mentoring awards, including the College of ACES Faculty Teaching Award in 2014, the International Dairy Foods Association Teaching Award in Dairy Manufacturing in 2017, and the Outstanding Advisor/Mentor Award from his home department in 2012. Miller’s research foci include the safety of Hispanic-style fresh cheeses and the effect of dietary bioactives (glucosinolates, phytoestrogens), prebiotics (galactooligosaccharides, human milk oligosaccharides), and probiotics on gut health. His research has been funded by USDA and several industry partners, including Abbott Nutrition, Mead Johnson Nutrition, PepsiCo, Archer Daniels Midland, and the Energy Biosciences Institute. He is a member of the Institute of Food Technologists and the American Society for Microbiology. He has been a member of ADSA since 2008 and has served the association in a number of capacities, including as a Dairy Foods officer (2016–2019) and as section editor for the Journal of Dairy Science (2018–current).

As vice president of product research at Dairy Management Inc., Kapoor leads National Dairy Council research programs in important areas such as milk powders, whey and milk protein ingredients, and dairy co-products at major universities to drive dairy innovation and sales on behalf of America’s dairy farmers.

Kapoor also holds an adjunct professor appointment at the Dairy and Food Science Department, South Dakota State University, which is one of the nation’s premier universities in dairy research and education.

Kapoor has more than 18 years of dairy foods research and development experience in industry and academia combined. During his tenure, Kapoor worked at various leading dairy and food companies such as Nestlé USA, Bongards, and Kerry Americas where he provided research and development leadership toward cheese and dairy ingredient-focused innovation.

Kapoor received his BS in dairy technology from the National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal, India, and his MS and PhD in food science with an emphasis on dairy science and technology from the University of Minnesota.

David Everett is currently the strategy lead for foundational science at AgResearch, New Zealand, an agricultural and food research organization. He most recently was the director of the Dairy Innovation Institute and held the Leprino Foods Endowed Professorship in Dairy Food Science (2015–2018), both positions at California State University, San Luis Obispo. Everett is originally from Australia and completed his PhD in food science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has 34 years of experience in research and teaching at universities in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the

United States, and at the CSIRO Division of Food Processing (Dairy Research Laboratories), an Australian federal government research center. His previous commercial research activities were at the dairy industry-funded Australian Food Ingredient Applications Centre in Melbourne as a science liaison manager to bring together publicly funded researchers and the dairy industry to generate new ideas. Everett is a principal investigator and fellow of the Riddet Institute National Centre of Research Excellence in New Zealand, and a fellow of the NZ Institute of Food Science and Technology, where he served as president and chairman of the board for two terms (2013–2015). He currently serves as an Editorial Board member of the International Dairy Journal, the Journal of Texture Studies, and is a section editor of the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Dairy Science. Everett is the immediate past chair of the Dairy Foods Division of the American Dairy Science Association (2019–2020) and has been a member of ADSA® for 27 years. He is currently an elected member of the Science and Program Coordination Committee of the International Dairy Federation.

Everett’s research program focuses on understanding the effect of food product microstructure on enzymatic reactions that produce flavor compounds; release of flavor compounds, nutrients, and bioactive components under in vitro oral and digestive conditions; colloidal and surface physical chemical reactions in dairy products; cheese science and technology; and dairy ingredient functionality. He has published over 150 research papers, conference abstracts, and book chapters.

Everett’s record of chairing a professional society board and initiating constitutional reform while ensuring fiscal responsibility, his industry connections in the United States and New Zealand, and his service to ADSA and other professional associations provides him with expertise and experience to serve on the ADSA board. He has a strong focus on good governance, leadership, and facilitating the free discussion of new ideas and approaches.

Everett currently lives in Palmerston North, New Zealand, with his wife and cat.

Mike grew up on a dairy farm in central Iowa, and from an early age he learned to appreciate cows and figure out how things work. He attended Dordt College in northwest Iowa to study biology and then Iowa State University for MS and PhD degrees in nutritional physiology. He joined the faculty at Michigan State University in 1988. His position is 65% research and 35% teaching.

VandeHaar’s research has spanned metabolic regulation, mammary biology, growth, health, and genomics, with a goal of improving lifetime feed efficiency. He seeks to carefully analyze contemporary problems, develop mechanistic hypotheses, execute studies to test them, and translate research into practice. Much of his early work focused on cost- effective feeding practices for dairy heifers. Since 2010, he has been the lead PI of a large collaborative project to develop genomic selection tools to improve dairy feed efficiency with funding from federal and industry sources. The goal is to revise the US Net Merit Index so that it includes breeding values for efficiency. VandeHaar finds great satisfaction in knowing that his research can help farmers produce quality food in a sustainable manner. He has published 75 refereed publications, 52 conference proceedings, and 141 abstracts and has given 127 invited presentations in 12 countries. VandeHaar has taught nutrition to 4,300 students over the past 30 years. His teaching is characterized by students as engaging, challenging, and effective. He challenges students to integrate concepts and understand mechanisms, and he uses hands-on projects and new technologies to enhance learning. He finds helping young people learn, grow, and gain confidence to be one of the most rewarding parts of his job. VandeHaar also has been the leader of the Spartan Dairy Ration project, which is used in teaching and on farms throughout the world.

VandeHaar has been a member of ADSA since 1982 and finds the ADSA Annual Meetings to be one of the highlights of his year—he believes that debating issues with other dairy scientists is a great way to learn. Within ADSA, VandeHaar has served on the editorial board for the Journal of Dairy Science, as co-chair of the 26th DiscoverSM Conference on Dairy Feed Efficiency, as a member and chair of the ADSA Production Division Council, and as chair of the ADSA Overall Program Committee for the annual meeting in 2019. In 2013, VandeHaar was awarded the ADSA American Feed Industry Association Award. He is currently a member of the NRC committee to reevaluate Nutrient Requirements of Dairy Cattle and on the USDA National Animal Nutrition Program.

VandeHaar’s goals as a professor have been to inspire others to think critically and do hypothesis-driven research that can help the dairy industry do a better job of feeding people in a sustainable manner. He views ADSA board membership as a means to further these goals. He believes that our association should (1) be vibrant and relevant so that young scientists will want to join and attend its annual meeting, (2) have a journal that is the first choice among animal science journals for dairy scientists to publish their research, (3) have a good working relationship with ASAS, (4) be connected to our industry partners, (5) maintain a healthy balance between basic science and its application, (6) maintain a great relationship between the foods and production divisions, and (7) stay fiscally strong.

Xin Zhao is a lactation physiologist. His career to date has been a journey characterized by diverse educational and professional experiences obtained in different countries. Zhao received his BSc and MSc in animal science in 1982 and 1985, respectively, from Nanjing Agricultural University, China. He was awarded his PhD in animal science from Cornell University in 1989. After completing his PhD studies, he moved to Canada for postdoctoral studies, first at the University of Guelph and then at the University of Toronto. Zhao was hired as an assistant professor in McGill University’s Department of Animal Science in 1993, was promoted to full professor in 2006, and has held a James McGill Professorship since 2007.

Dairy production plays an important role in world agriculture and human nutrition and is expected to continue to do so in the future. World milk production is increasing, especially in developing countries. At the same time, concerns over animal welfare, the environmental impact of animal production, and food safety issues are increasing and need to be addressed. Zhao works in the field of mammary gland biology, where his studies have focused on bovine mammary functions during normal and pathological states. He continues to lead a group that has adopted a multidisciplinary approach to studying lactation physiology, complex host–pathogen interactions during mastitis, and antibiotic resistance in bacteria from mastitic milk. The overarching goal of Zhao’s research program has been to significantly advance current knowledge in those three areas in order to sustain dairy production, reduce costs associated with mastitis, and mitigate the impact of antibiotic resistance on animal and human health.

Zhao has taught undergraduate courses in physiology and in biochemistry. He has trained 29 MSc students, 26 PhD students, and 18 postdoctoral fellows who are now working all over the world. Many of them have become distinguished educators, researchers, and industry leaders. The results of his research have been published in 225 journal articles, 6 book chapters, and more than 94 abstracts for scientific conferences.

Zhao has received several awards and honors. At McGill University, he held a William Dawson Scholarship between 2002 and 2007 and was appointed as a James McGill Professor in 2007 for a 7-year term and again in 2014. He received the Canadian Society of Animal Science’s Award for Technical Innovation in Enhancing Production of Safe Affordable Food in 2006 and the Canadian Society of Animal Science Fellowship Award in 2011. Zhao was the recipient of the ADSA West Agro Inc. Award in 2016.

Zhao was the chair of the Department of Animal Science at McGill University between 1999 and 2007. He served as chair of the Animal Science Review Panel for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and as a member on Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s science advisory board. He has been a member of the Dairy Cattle Genetics and Research (DairyGen) Council of Canadian Dairy Network’s Research Committee since 2008. Zhao has been an active member of ADSA since 1990. He has served on the ADSA West Agro Award Committee since 2017 and is frequently called upon as a reviewer for the Journal of Dairy Science. Zhao is also a member of several other professional societies, including the American Society of Microbiology, Poultry Science Association, and Canadian Society of Animal Science.

Laura Hernandez grew up in El Paso, Texas, and always had a keen interest in animal physiology. She was a collegiate swimmer and swam at Iowa State University for three years, then transferred to New Mexico State University. She received her BS and MS degrees in animal science from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She did her PhD at the University of Arizona in nutritional biochemistry. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular physiology at the University of Cincinnati Medical School. She joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011.

Hernandez’s main research focus is on the regulation of mammary gland function and maternal homeostasis during lactation. Specifically, she is interested in the role of serotonin on coordinating calcium dynamics in the mammary gland and how this relates to maternal calcium homoestasis during the early peripartum period.

She is also interested in the other physiological functions serotonin regulates within the mammary gland (i.e., glucose metabolism, fat metabolism, and so on) and how that pertains to maternal physiology during lactation as well as the formation of milk. She has authored 69 peer-reviewed publications, given 66 invited presentations in the United States and several countries, and has two patents for her research. She has trained four PhD students and three MS students. She was the winner of the 2017 American Dairy Science Association® Foundation Scholar in Production award and has been a section editor for the Journal of Dairy Science® in the physiology section since 2019. She also was on the Lactation Biology Section Committee from 2013–2016 for the ADSA Annual Meeting.

Hernandez’s goals as a professor have been to work on novel areas of lactation physiology and to mentor graduate students in this field who go on to work in academia and the dairy industry. Understanding how the mammary gland controls lactation is critical to cow health, and this has been the focus of her research program. She believes that our association should continue to have a vibrant research portfolio that encourages young scientists to join ADSA and also attend the annual meeting. Further, she says that research in the field of dairy science should continue to be cutting edge and provide in-depth understanding of both dairy cow production and dairy food production. She believes it is critical to continue to recognize novel areas of research that are critical to dairy production and dairy foods and to integrate them into the program. She feels this is important for our industry and also for our journal. Hernandez thinks we must continue to support a community that views our journal portfolio as a first choice for publication of the original research in the field of dairy science produced by our membership and others. She says it is also critical that ADSA continues to maintain great relationships with all our industry partners that are supportive of the society and the research that is produced by our members. These priorities are critical for maintenance of a diverse membership and commitment to the dairy industry, according to Hernandez.

Rafael Jiménez-Flores, originally from Mexico City, received his undergraduate education at La Salle University in Mexico City with a major in pharmaceutical chemistry and food science. His MS degree is from Cornell, where he worked with Frank Kosikowski. He first became a member of ADSA in 1982. He earned his PhD in food science and agricultural chemistry at University of California-Davis, where he continued his education in dairy foods science with Tom Richardson. Among his projects, he was involved in cloning milk proteins for their structure–function studies and successful production of milk proteins in yeast. Further work involved the cloning, engineering, and mammary gland directed expression of transgenic animals. He continued his work on dairy technology by focusing on milk fat, the milk fat globule membrane, and a process for removing cholesterol from butter oil.

His first academic position was as assistant professor at the University of Illinois in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition, where he was in charge of the dairy chemistry and technology program. He coached the dairy products evaluation team at the University of Illinois and established good relationships with the dairy industry in the production and processing areas. Dean Foods sponsored many of his undergraduate students to be active in dairy chemistry. After five years at the University of Illinois, he moved to California Polytechnic State University, where he was part of the Dairy Products Technology Center. His areas of research focused on novel methods for dairy processing, characterization of the milk fat globule membrane, surface interactions of milk components and lactic acid bacteria, spore incidence in dairy processing plants, and biological activity of milk components. He was part of the outreach effort at Cal Poly for 23 years, where he, together with Phil Tong, taught more than 4,000 people in short courses, including Dairy 101, Cheese Short Course, Artisanal Cheese Making, Cleaning and Sanitation in Dairy Plants, Ice Cream, and Milk Powder and Rehydration. As a professor in the dairy science department, he taught Dairy Processing, Introduction to Research for MS students, Sensory Evaluation of Dairy Foods, and Dairy Microbiology. He was the director of the Cal Poly Center for Applications in Biotechnology from 2013 to 2016. He has recently started his appointment as the J. T. “Stubby” Parker Endowed Chair in Dairy Foods at The Ohio State University.

Jimenez-Flores holds 6 patents and has published numerous book chapters and more than 150 peer-reviewed articles covering several aspects of dairy science and technology. At ADSA, he has been active in many roles: as chair for the Milk Protein and Enzyme Committee (15 years), chair of the Milk Protein and Enzyme Symposium at the annual meeting (8 symposia), director on the ADSA Board (5 years), editor (6 years) and senior editor (3 years) of the dairy foods section of the Journal of Dairy Science, and member (2 years) and chair (current) of the Lactation Biology Committee.