Rate My Professor Natalia Prieto Vidal

Natalia Prieto Vidal is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Food Science - Food Technology at Aarhus University, within the Faculty of Technical Sciences. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Spain. Following her doctoral studies, she held postdoctoral positions at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 2017 to 2019 and at the University of Guelph from 2019 to 2020. She joined Aarhus University in January 2021 as a postdoctoral researcher at AU FOOD, transitioned to an AIAS-COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship in October 2021, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, and has served as Tenure Track Assistant Professor since 2023. Her research centers on the revalorization of marine and terrestrial biomass into novel healthy and functional food products, the sustainable exploitation of underused marine biomass such as macroalgae, and the use of bioactive metabolites from food waste or by-products to develop active packaging solutions. Key areas of expertise include lipidomics, bioactive ingredients, food molecular interactions, sustainable packaging, and food structure. She leads several projects, including ALGOOD, which investigates the chemo-mechanical stabilization of Sargassum algae bioactive compounds like polyunsaturated fatty acids, carotenoids, and phlorotannins in food matrices using extrusion technology; Beta-LPS, exploiting marine betaine lipids for advanced liposomal delivery systems to enhance food quality and sustainability; and LipCellMeat, assessing fat supplementation's impact on lipid nutritional value in cultivated meat.

Prieto Vidal has received prestigious funding, including a 1.9 million Danish kroner Villum Experiment grant for the Beta-LPS project and the AIAS-COFUND fellowship. Her scholarly contributions include over 36 journal articles and one book chapter, with notable publications such as 'Unraveling the neutral and polar lipidome of Nordic brown macroalgae: A sustainable source of functional lipids' (Food Chemistry, 2024), 'Multifunctional phloroglucinol-loaded pea starch coating for refrigerated salmon' (Food Packaging and Shelf Life, 2024), 'Preparation and characterization of self-standing biofilms from cellulose nanofibrils and birch bark extract for active food packaging' (2023), and 'The effects of cold saponification on the unsaponified fatty acid composition and sensory perception of commercial natural herbal soaps' (2018). She serves on the editorial board of Translational Food Sciences and delivers lectures on food lipids and polysaccharides in master’s and bachelor’s programs, while coordinating the 'Food and Ingredients' course in the AU Summer School. Her work advances sustainable food systems and bioactive compound applications, contributing significantly to food science innovation.