Honouring science beyond our food

Most people never see the kind of work Milena Corredig does.

It happens in quiet laboratories far from supermarket shelves and restaurant menus, in climate chambers humming under artificial heat, and at facilities where light beams reveal the hidden structures inside everyday ingredients. Her impact is not measured in new products, but in the knowledge that makes innovation possible in the first place. 

For the rest of us, that can make her work hard to pin down.

“Even my mom still doesn’t understand what I do,” she admits.

What Corredig actually does is study food at its most fundamental levels. She examines the ways molecules collide and bind, how they fold into structures, and how they respond to heat, pressure, or time. Her work sits at the intersection of chemistry, physics, engineering, and everyday cooking. And it begins with very basic  questions:

Why does cheese stretch when it melts?

What makes milk foam? 

What happens inside a cake in the oven? 

She follows these questions downward to the micro-scale and then the molecular one, until she understands what is happening well enough to build outward again. And as she builds her insights, the stakes become clear. Food production accounts for more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and demand is rising. If we want to eat well while minimizing our impact on a warmer, more crowded planet, we need new ingredients, new processes, and a deeper understanding of how food behaves on every scale. Corredig’s work lays the groundwork for that shift.

It is this foundational, future-shaping work that earned her this year’s Villum Kann Rasmussen Award.

“Corredig’s pioneering research in food physics and groundbreaking contributions to food materials science have transformed the way structure and function of food components are studied at multiple length scales,” says Villum Fonden’s Scientific Director, Thomas Bjørnholm. “Her approach has had a great impact on academic research and innovative industrial applications for affordable, nutritious and sustainable foods.”

Corredig’s work explains how individual ingredients and structures behave, but she is equally focused on what happens when they are processed together. It is the part no one sees: the transformations that take place once heat, pressure, or time are applied, much like inside a sealed pot under pressure.

Imagine knowing everything about the ingredients going into your soup — the carrots, the onions, the spices. You can measure them, analyze them, and weigh them. But the moment the lid locks and pressure builds, you lose sight of what is happening inside. According to Corredig, most food innovation still operates this way. Companies adjust ingredients, test the outcome, adjust again, and repeat the cycle. It is an endless loop of trial-and-error.

Corredig wants to understand what happens inside the pot.

“You can know everything about the components,” she says, “but the pressure cooker is a black box. If you change the process, you change everything else.”

Her work begins in the lab, but it is built to inform the systems and processes that food companies must reinvent in the years ahead.

Because without understanding the underlying mechanism, she argues, it is impossible to build resilient systems. That lack of clarity makes companies hesitant to invest, leaves policymakers without evidence, and creates the risk that society stumbles into unanticipated problems. 

“We cannot afford to make mistakes,” she says. “So, the fundamental science now is to make sure that we can innovate faster without risk.”

This sense of urgency is why she often collaborates to study climate-resilient crops. Projects include how lupin grown under elevated CO₂ levels impacts its nutritional properties, or how climate stresses may affect beans in the future.

When asked what food will look like in twenty years, she refuses to predict. Still, she is certain about the principles that will matter. Food must be healthy, sustainable, nutritious, and affordable. 

And she is adamant that the system supporting that type of food must become more resilient. 

“As we grow biodiverse food,” she says, “processing needs to be more resilient.”

Corredig’s path into food science was not a straight line. She grew up in Italy wanting to be a physicist before switching to biology, which she says felt more applied and tangible. It also connected to something else: food.

“Being Italian, I think food is part of our life and our culture, so it seemed like the right thing to study,” she says.

After finishing her university education, she left what she calls her “cushy, beautiful life” in Italy for the cold of Canada, where she spent more than a decade as a researcher and professor in dairy chemistry, food physics, and food structure. That move clarified what she valued: collaboration, openness, and the belief that science is a human practice, not just a technical one.

Canada was also where she began noticing something troubling about her field. 

“I really did not understand why what we know in university does not end up being translated into impact,” she says. 

That frustration eventually pushed her out of academia and into a sabbatical at a nearby dairy company, where she learned valuable lessons about how research and innovation could be translated into tangible solutions.

When she decided to return to academia, she wanted to find a place where fundamental research and real-world impact could strengthen each other. This is when her eyes turned to Denmark.

Corredig arrived at Aarhus University seven years ago, where she now leads a team that moves fluidly between disciplines and scales of food science. She also holds a Lise Meitner Visiting Professorship at Lund University, a program designed to elevate female role models in science. 

Over her career, Corredig has supervised, coached, or collaborated with over 100 young researchers. Many now work in universities, start-ups, and global food companies. She thinks of this as a kind of bridge-building: creating connections, techniques, and ways of thinking that others can carry further than she ever could alone.

One person who sees Corredig’s work with students firsthand is Vojislav Vojinović, a principal scientist at Novonesis who co-supervises an Industrial PhD student with her. He first knew her from her work on milk structure and sought her out because of her clear, hypothesis-driven approach.

Working with her now, he’s struck by how quickly she grasps a problem, how easily she adapts to different levels of expertise, and how effectively she builds the right team around a scientific challenge.

“She always brings something valuable to every conversation and something I can take and work on immediately,” he says.

In Corredig’s view, a research group works best when boundaries stay porous — chemists drifting into physics, engineers learning from food scientists, students testing techniques they never expected to use. . . The important thing is movement.

“It’s like you’re just a little drop,” she says, “but from that you are making the waves.” 

Those waves ripple outward across countries and disciplines. They shape companies her students join, influence projects in labs she will never see, and support innovation and global collaborations.

Corredig has lived three scientific lives — in Italy, Canada, and now Denmark — and she knows the work extends far beyond any one place. The bridges she builds lead outward, carried by the people she trains and the tools she develops. They are the quiet infrastructure behind the food systems the world will need in the years ahead.