Filiz Koksel, associate professor, University of Manitoba

Filiz Koksel is an associate professor in the Department of Food and Human Nutritional Sciences (FHNS) at the University of Manitoba (UM). She was appointed Manitoba Strategic Research Chair in Sustainable Protein in July this year.

Born in Winnipeg while her father was completing graduate studies at UM, Koksel grew up in Turkey, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in food engineering from Middle East Technical University in Ankara. She later returned to Winnipeg to complete her PhD in food science at UM and joined the Department of FHNS as a faculty member in 2017.

She lives in Winnipeg with her husband and their five-year-old daughter.

Tell us a bit about what you’re working on at UM.

My research focuses on food processing, transforming ingredients, both plant-  and animal-based, into nutritious, appealing foods. These processes range from mixing or milling for bakery applications, to extrusion cooking, which is a process used for making puffed snacks like Cheetos or breakfast cereals like Cheerios. Extrusion also allows us to produce a wide range of plant-based meat alternatives.

Broadly, my research explores how to process different ingredients from cereals, pulses, oilseeds and other materials into foods that are both nutritious and appealing to consumers. We test at the ingredient, processing and food levels, and measure a wide range of quality attributes.

We look at nutritional quality; for example, whether proteins or starches are digestible. Starch digestibility affects how quickly blood sugar spikes, while protein digestibility affects how efficiently our bodies absorb amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.