Food Science & Technology : Research Programs: About Us

Athens Research Facilities and Equipment

A wide variety of facilities are available at the UGA Athens campus for research, student teaching, and industry projects. This includes over 20,000 square feet of food processing laboratories, including equipment for drying, freezing, evaporation, freeze drying, retorting, pasteurization, particle reduction, smoking, marination, meat processing, fermentation, and dairy processing.

In addition, equipment is available for advanced processing including high-pressure processing, supercritical fluid extraction, radiant energy processing, extrusion, and impingement drying/heating.

The department also has a food preparation kitchen equipped with gas and electric stoves, humidity controlled baking ovens, microwaves, and refrigerated and frozen storage. In addition, there are facilities for consumer and trained panel sensory tests, attribute testing, difference testing, and consumer preference.

Laboratories include physical properties testing with instrumentation for rheological characterization, light scattering, particle sizing, color measurement, thermal properties measurement, zeta potential, water activity determination, water binding properties, and headspace analysis.

The department also houses two biohazard labs for pathogen challenge studies in a contained processing environment.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. William Kerr (706-542-1085)

Contract Research and Development: Proprietary research contracts or access to facilities may be negotiated with the lab.