N (Niloufar) Sharif, PhD

Niloufar Sharif is a postdoctoral researcher in the Food Quality and Design group at Wageningen University & Research, where she designs edible coatings in close collaboration with an industry partner and is developing bioplastic packaging materials from food-industry side streams.

Her research career has taken her across Iran, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands, developing innovative materials for food. Her work centres on three connected themes: intelligent and active packaging and edible coatings; structures for the delivery of bioactive compounds; and sensors that monitor food quality in real time.

Niloufar holds a PhD in Food Science and Technology from Shiraz University (Shiraz, Iran), where she was admitted through the exceptional-talent track. Her doctoral research focused on the electrohydrodynamic processing of prolamins for the encapsulation of bioactive compounds. As a visiting PhD researcher at the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology (IATA-CSIC) in Valencia, Spain, she developed protein-polysaccharide edible coatings incorporating bioactive compounds for active food packaging. After obtaining her PhD, she began her first postdoc at Shiraz University, where she designed electrospun fiber and electrosprayed particle nanostructures for the delivery of bioactive compounds and food-packaging applications. She then spent more than four years at the Laboratory of Nanobiotechnology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, supported by a three-year Future Food fellowship and working in an R&D collaboration with Nestlé, Givaudan and Bühler, where she developed carbon-nanotube-based near-infrared optical sensors for intelligent food packaging (films and hydrogels), built a dedicated gas-testing setup, and translated the results into industrial applications.

Across her work, she bridges food technology, materials science and sensor development, with the shared goal of reducing food waste and making food systems more sustainable through innovative material design.