Dr Diana Salgado

Diana Salgado studied Food Engineering at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. During these years, she participated in several research projects on product development and waste revalorization winning awards, publishing in peer-reviewed journals and in international conferences. She then moved to a different city in Mexico to work at Tecnologico de Monterrey to continue doing research on product development and models for food processing. 

She obtained a Santander scholarship to do her Masters in Spain at Universidad de Vigo where her final project involved analysing aldehydes behaviour in milk submitted to high hydrostatic pressures. 

Then, she obtained a CONACyT scholarship to do her PhD in the UK at the University of Leeds where her main research was to analyse the efficiency of a novel process: foam-mat freeze-drying. 

She has worked in the pharmaceutical and food industries in the UK. Her previous job involved development of products from food loss and waste. 

She joined Prof Clare Mills’ team in 2023 in a project about food waste and insects funded by the FSA and in collaboration with FERA. She has developed food products for Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Food Challenge – the “gold standard” for diagnosing a food allergy – where nuts were successfully disguised in the samples. 

Her new project with Prof Mills’ team involves doing risk assessments of novel proteins in collaboration with Giant Leaps EU.