USU Food Scientist Receives American Oil Chemists' Society Top Honor

The American Oil Chemists’ Society (AOCS) selected Utah State University Professor Silvana Martini as the winner of the 2024 Alton E. Bailey Award. The award honors outstanding research contributions and exceptional service in disciplines related to fats, lipids, and oils, and it comes with a $750 honorarium and the opportunity to present an award lecture at the 2024 AOCS Annual Meeting.

While Martini is now in USU’s Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food Sciences and the director of the Aggie Chocolate Factory, she discovered her passion for chemistry as a high school student in Argentina. She decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at the University of La Plata, and in the last year of her degree, she took a food science course.

“I really liked it from the beginning,” said Martini. “So, I asked the professor if I could volunteer in her lab, and she agreed. I started working on fats and oils, and I liked it so much that I decided to stay at the university and do my Ph.D. there.”

The focus of Martini’s doctoral work was sunflower oil, then the main cooking oil in Argentina. One of the problems with sunflower oil is the wax that gets extracted along with it, leading to a turbidity that consumers don’t like. Martini looked to better understand how wax crystalizes in sunflower oil and detect it even in small quantities. She also worked with edible fat crystallization more generally, and after coming to Utah State, she began to study how high-intensity ultrasound could be used to induce that process.

While fat crystallization is an unfamiliar process to many people, it plays a pivotal role in providing structure to the food we eat. The fat found in coconut cream might be delicious, but it’s not interchangeable with the fat used to make biscuits; and when foods don’t have the consistency consumers expect, they usually don’t sell. Martini explained that partially hydrogenated oils, or trans fats, were once a popular solution for creating fats customized to the needs of specific foods, but they haven’t held up over time.

“Trans fats were great,” Martini said. “They were very cheap to make, and you could design a fat that was super hard for use in chocolate or softer for use in a cake. But the problem was that people studied trans fats in terms of nutritional properties and found that they are not very good for us.”

The United States ended the sale of foods containing trans fats in 2015, and nutritionists generally recommend a diet low in saturated fats as well. That mostly leaves liquid oils, explained Martini, and while they may be good for frying or a salad, they’re less useful for anything else. Food scientists continue to try to find healthy ways around this problem, however, and Martini is already pursuing one in the form of an unusual technology: high-intensity ultrasound.

“When we apply ultrasound to fats with low levels of saturated fatty acids, we get something that is a little bit harder with more structure,” Martini said. “That makes it usable for different food applications. We've been doing this for the last 15 years or so, and we've received quite a bit of grant money to continue our work.”

The basic research performed in Martini’s lab is aimed at the sort of foundational discoveries that can later be applied in the food industry, so it may take years for the benefits of her research to find their way into practice. However, the situation looks promising. Martini previously consulted with a Belgian company that aims to build a machine which would use high-intensity ultrasound to temper chocolate faster, and students from around the world continue to come to USU to be trained in the use of high-intensity ultrasound.

Martini also created and teaches a challenging introductory course titled, Chocolate: Science, History, and Society. When she isn’t developing novel ways to create food, perfecting the Aggie Chocolate Factory’s award-winning products, or teaching at USU, she is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society (JAOCS), and she served as president of the society from 2022 to 2023. The responsibility of deciding what gets published in the journal is something Martini takes seriously.

“It’s really an honor,” said Martini. “JAOCS was the first journal I published in, and I always saw it as the best journal in my area. Only people that are hardcore fats and oils scientists read our papers, so while it’s not very broad, the real impact of the journal is that everybody in our field knows JAOCS.”

Martini rose up through the ranks of the journal from reviewer to associate editor to senior associate editor to editor-in-chief, and she knows firsthand how dedicated the staff at the journal are.

“Other than the editor-in-chief, they’re all volunteers,” she said. “It's great to lead a group of people like that because they like the work. They’re all very busy, so they end up working on the journal on the weekends or after hours when the kids are asleep. I really appreciate the effort they put in.”

Managing an academic journal comes with pressure to publish research quickly and always think about the impact factor — that is, how often the average paper in the journal is cited in other papers. But just as Martini’s research is focused on larger issues in food science, so too does JAOCS prioritize the best research over everything else.

“We’re determined to publish the best papers we can, independent of what the metrics say,” said Martini. “We take our time making sure they're quality papers, and we don’t push reviewers to accept papers just to make a publisher happy. And I'm glad to be part of that. It's about teamwork, not the work of a single person. Everybody pushes toward the same goal.”