Professional Experience and Training

• Assistant Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (January 2023 – Present)
  Department of Nutritional Sciences, College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources (CAHNR), University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
• Founder, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Science Officer (July 2018 – December 2022), Halomine Inc., Ithaca, NY
• Postdoc Research Associate (August 2017 – Jan 2020)
  Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Research Interests

The major research focus of Dr. Qiao’s laboratory is to utilize food- or nature-derived materials, in combination with advanced bioprocessing technologies, to create scalable and cost-effective encapsulation solutions for the protection and target delivery of bioactives (e.g., antimicrobials, antioxidants, probiotics) into food, animal and human systems. Primary application areas will focus on organic animal feed, edible food packaging, and human dietary supplements, etc. For starting, the research in Dr. Qiao’s laboratory will include the following directions:

• Discover novel low environmental footprint processing techniques to extract bioactive compounds and biomaterials from foods and other nature-derived products including food wastes, and newly developed or underutilized nature resources.
• Microencapsulating and controlled release techniques based solely on food- or nature-derived materials for the target delivery of bioactives, including antimicrobials, antioxidants, and probiotics.
• Biomanufacturing of critical nutritional ingredients and bioactive products.

These research directions are envisioned to be highly collaborative with researchers and experts across a wide range of different fields and these newly developed technologies from Dr. Qiao’s group are expected to be commercialized very soon through incubating more startup companies in each field led by motivated students and postdocs under Dr. Qiao’s guidance.

The goal of research and commercialization efforts from Dr. Qiao’s lab is to 1) provide nutritious, safe, and affordable food and health products to the increasing number of populations with minimal impact on our environment and 2) incubate the next generation of food and biotech entrepreneurs to execute that.