SPIT Lab
Dr. Cordelia Running
Nutrition Science
Meet our scientists!
Here's our SPITting images
Dr. Cordelia Running
Boss lady. Fount of nerdy food facts. Saliva enthusiast.
Dr. Cordelia Running created the SPIT Lab. She loves food, and she loves chemistry. But more than both, she loves using chemistry to help other people love their food.
She came up with our cheesy SPIT lab acronym because when you try to recruit people to participate in the "Running lab" they get really confused when you feed them things...
Check out Dr. Running's Google Scholar page to see her list of published research.
Lissa Davis
PhD student
Lissa joined the SPIT lab in fall 2018 as a doctoral student in Nutrition Science. She's working on a project for the National Institutes of Health about how eating certain flavors, like bitter, spicy, or fatty flavors, changes in saliva proteins--in ways that may change those bitter, spicy, or fatty flavors!
Vinícius Valicente
PhD Student
Vinnie comes to us from Brazil, where he earned Bachelor's degree in Food Engineering. He has experience working with extrusion technologies, natural dyes, bioactive compounds, as well as measuring rheology and processing milk and dairy products. He enjoys reading, watching movies, exercising, and graphic design. In the SPIT lab, he'll be working on projects to reduce sugar in beverages, particularly beverages popular among adolescents.
Katy Pacheco
Master's Student
Katy joined us in fall 2020, after finishing a bachelor's degree in Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois. She'll be working on a study analyzing how saliva interacts with snacks, and how the type of snacks you eat might change your saliva.
All of the undergrads
Sorry folks--we can't take any more undergrads right now. Check in with Dr. Running in Summer 2022!
Neyven Garal
Undergraduate
Neyven joined us in 2022 to work on the Vegetable Gummy Bear Game project with Lissa Davis.
Neha Kapur
Undergraduate
Neha teamed up with Katy Pacheco in 2022 to help complete the Snacks and Saliva study. She's working on going to Dental school.
SPIT Lab grads
They've moved on, but their data remain forever!
(hopefully in published form...)
Madeline Harder
Bachelors in Food Science, 2022
Madeline worked on project related to how people rate samples different when asked about them aloud vs when rating them on a screen. She then went on to grad school in Food Science at Penn State!
Li-Chu Huang
Master's in Nutrition Science, 2021
Li-Chu studied how spit (of course!) and fatty foods (mmm.....) may interact, and how that relates to dietary habits. Check out her paper on how spit and fatty taste may interact.
Sarah Pitts
Masters of Food Science, 2021
Sarah is worked with both the SPIT lab and Dr. Lisa Mauer's lab, from Purdue's Food Science Department. Her graduate work studied sweetness and texture in reduced sugar foods. She then moved on to a sensory scientist position with Hershey's.
Keona Lee
Bachelors in Health Sciences, 2021
Keona worked on how bitter taste in vegetables and fruits may interact with saliva. She graduated in 2021 and then went on to dental school, where she is spreading the story of saliva importance!
Ryan Calvert
Post-doctoral scholar, 2020
Dr. Calvert joined the SPIT Lab to explore bioinformatics related to foods, eating, and health. In other words, he built a sparkly (literally) computer we are using to process terabytes of data we collected from salivary proteomic and dietary analyses. Check out some of Ryan's work on how scientists made molar solutions (possibly incorrectly) here.
Madison Wierenga
Bachelors in Public Health, 2020
Maddy graduated from Purdue in 2020. Her research with us focused on how people experience chemesthesis, the chemical sense of irritancy, especially from carbonated beverages. Check out Maddy's work on carbonated beverages and sensation here.
Ciera Crawford
Masters in Food Science, 2018
Ciera is the first graduate of the SPIT lab! She completes her Master's Degree in Food Science in 2018, which focused on how eating chocolate changes your spit, in ways that likely make that chocolate less bitter and astringent. So, perhaps the darker chocolate you eat, the darker chocolate you like. Check out Ciera's work on bitter taste, chocolate, and saliva here.
Dr. Jonathan Kershaw
Post-doctoral Scholar, 2018
Dr. Kershaw was a post-doctoral scholar in the SPIT lab and is now faculty at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He worked on:
Fruits & Veggies to Flavor & Spit
Cameron Wicks
Bachelors in Food Science, 2018
Cameron graduated from Purdue in 2018 with an undergraduate degree in Food Science. She worked on several saliva collection studies, including our preliminary work on how special parts of the tongue might have special spit.
Miguel Odron
Bachelors in Dietetics, 2017
Miguel graduated from Purdue in 2017 with an undergraduate degree in Dietetics, earning himself some extra experience as a sensory scientist! He worked on everything. Seriously.
