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NEWS STATEMENT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Jennifer Snyder or Shannon Shoesmith October 31, 2001 CORN REFINERS HONOR OUTSTANDING RESEARCHERS The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) is proud to announce the 2001 winners of the CRA Outstanding Paper and Poster Awards. The awards provide recognition to outstanding researchers for their efforts to understand and improve the corn refining industry. The awardees were selected during the American Association of Cereal Chemists' (AACC) annual meeting in Charlotte, N.C., on October 14-18, 2001. The 2001 CRA/AACC Outstanding Paper Award winner is Dr. David Johnston of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agricultural Research Service, Eastern Regional Research Center. Winners of the 2001 CRA/AACC Outstanding Poster Awards are Yulin Ji of Iowa State University and Dr. Yuan Yao of Pennsylvania State University. Over 440 papers and posters were presented at the meeting. "CRA is pleased to honor these scientists for their commitment to future advances in corn wet milling technology," CRA Senior Director of Regulatory and Technical Affairs Jennifer Snyder said. "The success of the corn wet milling industry is due to imaginative, innovative individuals who continue to search for new and better products as well as processing technologies." Johnston 's paper, "A corn wet milling process using proteases to reduce steep time and SO2 requirements," could lead to significant energy savings, environmental benefits and reduced production time by shortening the steep time in corn wet milling processing facilities. Johnston is a research food technologist at USDA's Eastern Regional Research Center. Ji's poster, "Functional and structural properties of unusual starches from developmental corn lines," presents research showing that starch obtained from exotic corn varieties had greater viscosity and set back values than normal corn starch. The research could lead to a method to obtain value-added traits to produce starch with desirable functions. Ji is a doctoral student in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Iowa State University. Yao's poster, "Single kernel sampling method for maize starch analysis while maintaining kernel vitality," presents a potential method for discovering unique starch structures. The method allows large-scale screening of populations of corn kernels for genotypes that produce novel starch structures. Yao is a post-doctoral associate in the Department of Food Science at Pennsylvania State University. For more information on the corn refining industry, visit the Corn Capsules newsletter page. 
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