Executive Committee

PhD in Agricultural Engineering (University of Córdoba – UCO, Spain).
Full Professor in Engineering and Technology of Livestock Production, as well as in Near-Infrared Sensors for Quality, Safety, and Traceability of Agro-Food Products at the Faculty of Agricultural and Forestry Engineering (ETSIAM), University of Córdoba, Spain. She has served as Director of the Master’s program “Engineering and Management in the Food Chain”, Vice Dean for International Relations, and currently coordinates a Doctoral Program in Engineering.

She is internationally recognized for her expertise in the use of sensors and emerging technologies applied to food integrity and authenticity. Her work in NIR spectral sensors covers both fundamental and applied research. She began in 1999, focusing on nonlinear calibration methodologies to address the complex challenge of measuring ingredient composition in unground compound animal feeds. Since then, her research has expanded to cover a broad spectrum of food and agricultural applications—feeds, fats and oils, meats, protein-rich animal by-products, milk and dairy, and various fruits and vegetables—using NIRS, either alone or in combination with other sensors. A key area of her expertise lies in processing large datasets using multivariate analysis and nonlinear modeling tools.

Her research has led to over 350 scientific publications, including 151 peer-reviewed articles in top-tier journals (H-index: 34), along with numerous invited talks at national and international conferences and workshops. She has participated in, managed, and coordinated numerous national and European R&D projects, as well as industry-driven technology transfer contracts. She led the COST Action SensorFINT (European Network for Assuring Food Integrity Using Non-Destructive Spectral Sensors, 2020–2024), which brought together more than 30 countries and 300 researchers from Europe and beyond, and the COST Innovator Grant SensAIfood (AI Methods for Spectral Data Processing to Address Food Fraud and Authenticity Issues, 2024–2025). She has served as President-Elect of ICNIRS (2021–2025) and Chair of the ICNIRS Educational Committee (2017–2025). Additionally, she is an editor of the Journal of NIRS, a consultant for the FAO, and a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board at the Institute for Global Food Security, Queen’s University Belfast (UK).

She was awarded the International Tomas Hirschfeld Award in 2014 and the International Birth Award in 2020 for her outstanding contributions to the field of NIR spectroscopy.

Email : dcperez@uco.es

Professor Roger Meder is a New Zealand chemist and physicist with specific expertise in both NMR and NIR spectroscopy and imaging, particularly with application to wood and agricultural products. He graduated with a BSc and MSc in chemistry from Otago University in New Zealand, and completed his PhD with Prof Sir Paul Callaghan FRS at Massey University in the field of physics, specifically magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy. Roger was introduced to NIR spectroscopy and chemometrics while working at the New Zealand Forest Research Institute by Robert Meglen from NREL, USA in 1993 – so has now been working in the field for over 30 years. He first started using IR, NIR and NMR spectra to predict wood quality to provide rapid non-destructive measurement of end-use performance. He has worked at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) where he was the Group Leader of the Forest Genetics, Genomics and Phenomics group. He was appointed an Adjunct Professor in the Forest Research Institute at the University of the Sunshine Coast and the Universiti Putra Malaysia and continues to publish peer-reviewed research and supervise post-graduate students. Over the last 10 years he has held several coordination positions within the Forest Products Division of the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO). More recently he established an independent consultancy (Meder Consulting) in the broader forestry and agricultural sector. In addition to those roles, he has been leading the analytical laboratory services at Ridley Agriproducts; Australia’s leading supplier of animal feed in the livestock, poultry feed, pet food and aquatic feed sectors. A major focus of this role is to expand a distributed NIR network across 20 manufacturing and processing plants for testing of ingredients and finished products.

He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Near Infrared Spectroscopy and chair of the Australian NIR Spectroscopy Group (ANISG) and was Chair of the organising committee for NIR-2019 in Australia. In 2023 he was awarded the Tomas Hirschfeld Award by ICNIRS for his innovation and contribution to NIR spectroscopy.

Email : roger@mederconsulting.com

Søren Balling Engelsen is Professor and head of the section for Spectroscopy & Chemometrics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has a PhD (1992) in vibrational spectroscopy and molecular modelling from the Technical University in Denmark including one year stay abroad at Cornell University (US) to study molecular dynamics simulations. From 1992 to 1995, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Ingénierie Moléculaire, INRA-Nantes (France). Since 1995 he was employed as assistant professor in ”Spectroscopy and molecular modeling” in the research group of Professor Lars Munck and started to use NIR spectroscopy for diverse applications within high-throughput non-invasive industrial quality control and academic food and health research. Since 2004 he has been professor in Biospectroscopy and been heading the Spectroscopy & Chemometrics group at University of Copenhagen (now approx. 40 persons). The research focus is on the development- and application of multivariate high-throughput quantitative spectroscopic methods for biological samples in quality control, process analytical technology, foodomics and metabolomics. He has authored and co-authored more than 170 peer-reviewed scientific papers and been granted two patents.

Email : se@food.ku.dk