Amy McMackin
Amy McMackin
Student / Programme Doctorate at D-HEST
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Research area
Amy's doctoral research is focused on developing novel 'green' solvent systems to purify functional proteins from plants. As world food systems increasingly trend towards environmentally sustainable and ethically produced food items, there is growing demand for novel plant-based protein sources and innovative processing methodologies. The past decades have seen extensive exploration of proteins from legumes (i.e., soy, lentils) and grains (i.e., wheat, oats). However, extracted proteins frequently elicit poor consumer acceptance due to pungent flavors, off-color, and poor texture. Other protein-rich crops, such as rapeseed, have only been used for vegetable oil production because of similar concerns. Amy's doctoral research explores a novel processing strategy for peas and rapeseed that mitigates these problems due to natural deep eutectic solvents’ selective capacity to extract antinutritive and acrid plant polyphenols from protein-rich seeds before protein recovery. The insights gained from this research enhance our foundational comprehension of controlling extracted plant proteins’ properties, enabling researchers to effectively develop a new generation of functional and neutral-tasting plant protein ingredients.
This project is supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alexander Mathys, Dr. Samy Boulos, and Dr.-Ing. Joseph Dumpler.
Born in New Brunswick (Canada), Amy McMackin studied Chemistry in Quebec (Canada). In 2020, she received her BSc in Environmental and Bioresource Chemistry from the Université du Québec à Rimouski. Throughout her bachelor's studies, Amy had the opportunity to contribute to several research projects in Chemical Oceanography, notably looking at the consequences of oil spills in cold environments on blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) under the direction of Prof. Dr. Richard St-Louis (UQAR), and studying the impacts of hydroelectric dams in Northern Quebec on the marine ecosystem of James Bay under the direction of Prof. Dr. Huixiang Xie (UQAR-ISMER). Amy obtained her master's degree in Chemistry in 2022 through a joint project between the Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR) and the Centre de développement bioalimentaire du Québec (CDBQ). For her master's thesis, Amy looked at valorizing brewer's spent grain by producing sustainable, spherical exfoliating microbeads for personal hygiene products. This project was realized under the direction of Prof. Dr. Sébastien Cardinal (UQAR) and Dr. Vincent Banville (CDBQ). Throughout her master's studies, Amy wrote about sustainability for a local newspaper (Le Mouton Noir) and her personal blog (Periodically Green), and contributed to the Montreal-based non-profit InitiaSciences as their Communications Coordinator.