Sebastiano Porretta is senior researcher of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development (formerly Ministry of Industry) at the Experimental Station of the Food Preserving Industry, SSICA, Parma, Italy where is Head of the Marketing and Consumer Science Department. He is well known to the Scientific Community for research in the study of product development and quality. His original approach to studying the interactions between foods and consumers and evaluating the effects of ingredients and processing on food acceptability is considered groundbreaking. He is a professor of food processing and sensory and consumer science in many universities and author/editor of 30 books. Professor Porretta also serves on editorial boards of several international peer-reviewed journals. He is a member of the International Union of Food Science and Technology (IUFoST) Board of Directors (2020–2022), and fellow since 1998 of The International Academy of Food Science and Technology (IAFoST), an elected group of distinguished food scientists. Since 1997 he has been President of the Italian Association of Food Technology.
Howard Moskowitz is a legendary product market researcher, experimental psychologist, and inventor of world-class market research technologies utilized by virtually every company that matters. In 2004, Dr Moskowitz was the subject of a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, ‘the Ketchum Conundrum’, which Gladwell followed up with a TED talk entitled ‘Choice, Happiness, and Spaghetti Sauce’. Most recently, Dr Moskowitz founded Mind Genomics Associates in 2014 to investigate how people think about aspects of their daily lives in order to provide insights for business and social research purposes. Dr Moskowitz earned his PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University. In a long and distinguished career in market research, he founded the Chemical Senses journal, the first scientific journal devoted to the study of taste and smell.
Attila Gere is a sensory scientist working at the Szent István University, Budapest, Hungary as a postdoctoral researcher of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He earned his BSc in food sciences (with a specialization on distilling) and his MSc in food quality and preference. He received his PhD in Sensory Analysis form Szent István University, Hungary in 2016. His thesis deals with consumer sensory evaluation methods and sensometrics. The thesis won the Karai János predoctoral award in 2015. He started his academic career at the Corvinus University of Budapest in 2015 and has been working as assistant professor at Szent István University since 2017. In the academic year 2016/2017, he won a postdoctoral scholarship awarded by the Hungarian Government to the most promising young talents. His major research topic is titled “Uncovering the subconscious consumer mind” and it covers multiple areas such as consumer sensory evaluation methods, eye-tracking, and sensometrics. He is a member of the Institute of Food Technologists and the Hungarian Chemical Society. He has been publishing research articles since 2014 and working in the Sensory Laboratory of SZIU. He established stable scientific cooperation with numerous research institutes around the world. He has published several research papers which received hundreds of citations resulting an h-index of 10 and a cumulative impact factor higher than 100. He has wide industrial connections as he has been working for international food companies. Currently, he is part of a research group which won the support of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund. Attila lives in Budapest with his family, he enjoys hiking and reading.
