Ruplal Choudhary

Biography

Dr. Choudhary is a Food and Bioprocess Engineer with 20 years of academic and industrial experience in design and development of food processing equipment and operations. Before moving to SIU, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Manitoba, and South Dakota State University. Dr. Choudhary also worked as a senior faculty member of Dairy Engineering Division at the National Dairy Research Institute Karnal, and as a Scientist at the Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering Bhopal, India.

Research Interest

Dr. Choudhary is interested in improving safety and quality of foods such as dairy, soy and fruits and vegetables. The food safety research includes removal of microbial pathogens as well as mitigation of food allergy using the state of the art nonthermal processing technologies such as germicidal ultraviolet light, nonthermal plasma, power ultrasound and nanotechnology. Near infrared spectroscopy and color machine vision systems are used for rapid sensing of safety, quality and defects in food products. The other area of research interest is the process development for conversion of ligno-cellulosic biomass to biofuels, especially improving the enzymatic conversion of cellulose and hemicellulose to fermentable sugars for biofuel industry.