27 Nov 2009 --- Hanne Christine Bertram receives the award for her research in meat and meat products. The purpose of the Award instituted by the Danisco Foundation is to help improve food products, notably industrially produced foods.

The Danisco Award 2009 of DKK 250,000 goes to Hanne Christine Bertram, Senior Scientist at the Department of Food Science, Aarhus University. She receives the award for her research in meat and meat products. The research has given an important understanding of water binding in food and particularly in meat and meat products. Her work has provided a new understanding of how the water distribution in meat affects its technological quality and how the protein structure in meat influences the water distribution.

Hanne Christine Bertram is 33 years old and has published 60 peer-reviewed articles and contributed to several books. She is respected for communicating advanced research results in an easily understandable way and is a popular lecturer and teacher. She is also the supervisor of five PhD students and one post doc student. Since 2007, she has been working on a new platform for metabolomics based on high-field NMR and mass spectrometry. The metabolic fingerprint is determined by way of metabolomics, providing not only a complete description of the food but also an understanding of the human body’s response to these food products. In 2006, she received the Young Elite Researchers Award 2006 of the Danish Council for Independent Research.

The award winner’s research field is important to the meat products that consumers around the world will be eating in the future because of the relationship between the water distribution in meat and the eating quality. This field is also of great interest to Danisco, because the company is engaged in ingredients for the meat industry in the areas of shelf life, safety, nutritional profile, texture and colour.

The award, which is mainly granted to promising, young researchers with a view to strengthening their career opportunities, was presented on 24 November 2009 at the FOOD Denmark congress held at the Technical University of Denmark.