Srinivasan Damodaran is a Professor of Food Chemistry and Chair of the Department of Food Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Damodaran received his B.Sc. (1971) in chemistry from the University of Madras, Chennai, India; M.Sc. (1975) in Food Technology from University of Mysore, Mysore, India, and Ph.D. (1981) in Food Chemistry from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
After a three year post-doctoral training in the Department of Food Science at Cornell University, he was appointed as Assistant Professor of Food Chemistry in the Department of Food Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1988 and to Professor in 1993. In 2000 he received the Winder-Bascom Professorship in Food Science and in 2016 he was awarded the Owen R. Fennema Endowed Professorship in Food Chemistry. He served as Chairman of the Department of Food Science during 2006-2010.
Dr. Damodaran’s research is primarily in the area of Protein Chemistry, with an emphasis on the physico-chemical and functional properties of food proteins.
He has trained over 38 graduate students and post-doctoral associates. He has published over 160 research articles and holds 13 US patents. He is the lead editor of the textbook on food chemistry, “Fennema’s Food Chemistry”, 4th and 5th Editions; and a reference book on Food Proteins and Their Applications (with A. Paraf), and Food Proteins and Lipids (Plenum Press). He is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society – Division of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. He is on the editorial board of Food Biophysics.