Nebraska U helps Cano Roca pursue her passion for food safety

April 13th, 2022

As a problem-solver with an affinity for STEM, it was only natural for Carmen Cano Roca to pursue food engineering as an undergraduate.

Now, she’s completing a doctoral program as a graduate research assistant in the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and looks to stay close to the community she’s built for herself in the Midwest.

Cano Roca’s interest in food science started at an early age when she had the desire to solve a need for food safety in her home country, Guatemala. She pursued that path and through opportunities, landed at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln where she’s fallen in love with research and the community she’s built for herself. Cano Roca completed her master’s degree at Nebraska with a thesis on commercial probiotics and will defend her doctoral dissertation on the control of Salmonella on poultry products at the end of April.

“In Guatemala, we have challenges with inequality, poverty and food security,” she said. “There are high rates of malnutrition in my country, so when I was in high school, I decided that I would like to help solve these problems. I looked at my skills and at the problems and figured out that I could do food engineering.”

Through her undergraduate program in food engineering, she had the opportunity to complete a six-month research project in Nebraska, which led her to join the master’s program. After three years working in industry, she returned to pursue her Ph.D., a testament to her positive experience in Nebraska.

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Story by Kateri Hartman | UNL Communications