Dear friends and colleagues,

It is my great pleasure, and privilege, to be elected as President of the International Association for Cereal Science and Technology. Globally, cereal products and technology has received a lot of attention from researchers, industry and consumers, all trying to ensure optimum nutrition, tasty food products and sustainable production techniques. It is an honour to be the president of ICC in these challenging times. For the past 50 + years ICC has been responding to these issues and providing valuable insights to strategically bring resilience and safety to cereal science and technology. It is an honour to work with our technical committees, and the support of our members, to ensure that cereal science and technology continues to advance at a pace required by an ever expanding and demanding consumer population.

As many of you know, I have been involved in cereal science for the last 25 years: since my undergraduate days at London University, UK where I worked on starch biosynthesis pathways, through to my PhD and postdoctoral positions in the 1990’s where we were working on friabalin like proteins (pueroindolines) and the impact of starch-protein and cell wall components on cereal products and human nutrition. More recently the work of my group during the last 15 years has focussed on the effect of ingredients on the textural and nutritional functionality of cereal products, consumer acceptability and novel food processing technologies employed by the food industry, and the link between cereal digestibility and illnesses such as obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. The world of cereal science continually amazes me, together with the resourcefulness and enthusiasm of all the colleagues I have had the pleasure to work with throughout the world.

It is my hope that during my term as president of this august institute, I will be able to welcome as many of the cereal community to our conferences, workshops and project activities as I can. The importance of cereal grains, and wholegrains in particular, are of paramount concern to nutritionists, researchers, the industry, consumers and governments across the globe.  It is a vision of mine that through greater co-operation and collaboration we may have a powerful voice in shaping the future of food and cereal science. To this end, I hope that you will join me at the ICC conferences during 2019 and 2020 (especially our home conference in the beautiful city of Vienna in April of 2019), and that we can meet to discuss new ideas and initiatives. 

My kindest regards

Charles Brennan 

Professor of Food Science and Human Nutrition, Lincoln University, New Zealand