FST Undergrad has exciting summer ahead

Thanks to a number of scholarships, Evann Dufort will be all over the country this summer. She'll go to Illinois for an internship with Kraft, to New Orleans for IFT, to Sacramento for the American Cheese Society conference, and back to Illinois to finish up the internship.

Evann Dufort is completing her third year at UC Davis, pursuing a B.S. in Food Science (Biology/Microbiology emphasis) and a minor in East Asian Studies. She is the Vice President of the Food Tech Club, and was previously the Activities Chair. Evann was recently awarded the IFT Evan Turek Kraft Memorial Scholarship and Internship and will begin her 12-week internship at Kraft in Glenview, Illinois in June.  She will be working in a Research and Development lab under the direction of Andrew E. McPherson Ph.D, whose research interests focus on the structure-function relationships of carbohydrates and their applications in food systems.

Evan Turek, after whom this scholarship/internship is named, held the most senior position on Kraft Foods' technical ladder: the Senior Kraft Foods Fellow in the Strategic Research department of Kraft Foods Global Inc. He was an exceptional leader and mentor in the field of Food Science and helped shape and inspire the next generation of Food Scientists. He was a member of the Institute of Food Technologists, a representative for the Center for Advanced Processing and Packaging Studies, and worked for Kraft Foods for over thirty years, leading processing innovations for the safety, quality and preservation of foods. 

This IFT scholarship will also take Evann Dufort to the IFT Annual Meeting & Food Expo in New Orleans at the end of June. As the newly elected IFT Student Association Pacific Western Area Representative, Evann will represent IFT Student Association, as well as the Food Tech Club, the Northern California Chapter of IFT, and our UC Davis Department of Food Science and Technology. 

The American Cheese Society also recently selected Evann as a Student Scholarship recipient and she will be returning to Sacramento for the annual ACS Conference at the end of July. She feels very fortunate to have these opportunities and will share her summer’s food science experiences through a blog for her peers, the Department of Food Science and Technology, her beloved Food Tech Club Members, and the NCIFT Hornblower. 

Evann declares, “The Food Science Department at UC Davis has prepared me to work for Kraft Foods and has provided me with so many opportunities to expand my knowledge of Food Science, through classes, internships, associations with NCIFT, the Food Tech Club, and other experiential extracurricular activities.” Outside of classes, Evann is devoted to community service through her involvement in Prytanean Women’s Honor Society and the Cal Aggie Marching Band-uh! She holds strong interests in working with dairy products, as well as agricultural products, such as peaches and tomatoes. In the future, Evann Dufort plans to attend graduate school, work in the industry, and then become a university lecturer for Food Science.


Posted from: http://foodscience.ucdavis.edu/fst-undergrad-has-exciting-summer-ahead/
Author: Andrea Thompson of UC Davis