COMFOCUS has recently launched the Academic Training program

COMFOCUS has recently launched the Academic Training program, which is part of the project summer schools. The aim of Academic Training is to foster learning with COMFOCUS and demonstrate and disseminate harmonised measurements, protocols, datasets, as well as to study best practices in the field of food consumer science.

Topics of Academic Training include: general introduction to consumer science, hands-on training at food consumer science harmonised measurements, protocols and guidelines for use of infrastructures and dedicated installations. Furthermore, basic insight in data models and methods of creating meta data, use of guidelines, raw data acquisition and processing (data) pipelines.

This online training session was held online on November 20, 2023. Besides an online event, the project is also going to organise a couple of face-to-face events in different European cities. The first one will take place in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in February – March, 2024!

The online event, that took place in November, gathered over 35 participants for insightful learning, provided by the project members.

Scientific coordinator of the project Hans van Trijp (Wageningen University&Research) opened the training with the challenges the food consumer science field faces nowadays and solutions that COMFOCUS can offer for integrating it and bringing to another level.

Academic Training included presentations from the project members Liisa Lahteenmaki (Aarhus University), Austėja Kažemekaitytė (University of Trento), Beatrice Biondi (University of Bologna) and Mari Sandell (University of Turku).  During the event, they raised discussions on harmonised psycho-social and psychophysiological measures, talked in details about explicit and implicit measures, provided insights into cross-sectional and longitudinal studies in food consumer science and talked about individual differences in consumer sensory perception.