Dr. Wang received the 2021 Faculty Stewardship Award

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/stewardship-awards-faculty-staff

Faculty Award

Selina Wang, Cooperative Extension specialist and Olive Center research director

Selina Wang’s commitment to the UC Davis Olive Center and its donors has been a key factor in the center’s success. Largely thanks to her stewardship efforts, the Olive Center has been fully self-supporting since it was born in 2008. Wang’s dedication to building relationships with corporate partners and within the olive and olive oil industries have also helped maintain the center’s reputation for excellence.

Notably, Wang helped established a relationship with prominent donor and alumnus Firmin Berta, whose family’s giving has now exceeded $1 million to UC Davis. In 2019 the Berta family was recognized for their gifts with the naming of Wang’s research laboratory as the Berta Family Laboratory.

Wang’s expertise in donor stewardship also extends to corporate and industry donations, which have been critical in allowing the Olive Center and Wang Lab to achieve their goal of supporting California food and agriculture.

A special part of Wang’s stewardship is her inclusive relationship-building style — she personally updates donors on research activities and students’ achievements, and encourages students from her lab to send handwritten thank-you cards and letters to donors, allowing them to truly be part of the success of the Olive Center and Wang Lab.

Dr. Wang received the 2021 AF Excellent in Research Award

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/academic-senate-and-federation-honor-top-scholars

Excellence in Research Award

Selina Wang, associate Cooperative Extension specialist, Department of Food Science and Technology, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences — She is responsible for bringing chemistry into practice as the standard method of determining olive oil quality. Her work brought new analytical methods to the broad question of what genuinely represents quality in olive oil. Moreover, her work was the research foundation that led the California Department of Food and Agriculture to adopt California olive oil standards and for the Food and Drug Administration to establish a standard of identity for olive oil, forever changing the basis of quality in the global trade of a major commodity. Wang’s work has since expanded to other high-value oils, with the aim to bring the same quality standardization to other sectors of California food and agricultural industries.

Dr. Wang promoted to Associate CE Specialist

The Wang Lab’s hard work was acknowledged by our peers, colleagues and industry stakeholders. We continue to focus on our missions:

(1) identifying the important chemical markers for quality, purity and health in fruit, vegetable and other food;

(2) developing robust (faster and cheaper) detection methods so they can be easily adopted by industries;  

(3) modifying processing to improve efficiency, quality, health and value in food products.

The Wang Lab welcomed a new PhD student

This quarter we officially welcomed Zatil Afrah, first-year PhD student in Food Science and Technology, to our group. She came to us from Indonesia where she worked as a researchers in Research Center for Chemistry at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. She was involved in several research projects including method development for heavy metal analysis in foods, film-forming ability of fish proteins, isoflavone profile of tempe (a fermented food from soybean) and toxicity study of stinging nettle leaf extract. She has a BS in Food Science and Technology from Bogor Agricultural University in Indonesia and MS in Food Science and Technology from Oregon State University.

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Dr. Wang presented in webcast at the ACS Program-in-a-Box

Dr. Wang talked about how our study on the quality and purity of supermarket olive oil led to new olive oil standards for the state of California. She also discussed the emerging field of food forensics and how her lab is collaborating with agriculture in California to solve important challenges, like discovering valuable compounds in traditional food production waste streams to create new value-added products. She was joined by other experts Dr. Daniela Barile (Professor & Chemist, UC Davis), Dr. Ricardo San Martin (Research Director & Industry Fellow, UC Berkeley), and Kerri Jansen (Assistant Editor, Chemical & Engineering News).

More information and video can be found here.

Hilary passed Qualifying Exam!

Congratulations to Hilary who passed her qualify exam on May 31st. She is feeling very relieved and excited about doing more experiments in the lab and in the kitchen.

She made this amazing looking and tasting cake for our lab graduation party (more pictures to come).

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Newest Member in the Lab

We welcomed our newest member, Melon, in the lab this week! He is currently under training to become the best at what he does and loves to do, just like how everyone starts in our lab. He’s already mastered many impressive skills under the guidance of our lab specialist Shirley Li and gained approval from his labmates.

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