Rate My Professor Xiaonan Lu

Xiaonan Lu is Professor in the Department of Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry at McGill University. He holds the appointments of Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Food Safety, William Dawson Scholar, and Ian & Jayne Munro Chair in Food Safety. He received a BSc in Food Science from Ocean University of China in 2007 and a PhD in Food Science with a minor in Analytical Chemistry from Washington State University in 2011. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University, he joined the University of British Columbia as Assistant Professor in 2013, where he led the Food Safety & Health Engineering Laboratory and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. His research group relocated to McGill University in 2020, and he was promoted to Full Professor in 2024.

Lu’s research program centers on the development of innovative rapid sensing, instrumentation systems, and detection methods to ensure food safety and prevent food bioterrorism and fraud. His laboratory applies molecular biology and genomic approaches to study stress responses and pathogenesis of microorganisms threatening agri-food systems and public health. Additional areas include food synthetic biology and cellular agriculture for producing food with tailored nutritional value and longer shelf life, as well as investigations into interactions between food components and gut microbiota. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of ASM Food Microbiology and holds editorial positions with Trends in Food Science & Technology, Journal of Food Science, BMC Microbiology, Frontiers in Food Science and Technology, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, and other journals. Among his honors are Fellow of the Institute of Food Technologists (2026), Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada (2025), Fellow of the American Chemical Society AGFD (2025), W.J. Eva Award from the Canadian Institute of Food Science & Technology (2024), and multiple young scientist awards from the Institute of Food Technologists, American Chemical Society, and International Association for Food Protection. Lu teaches courses including FDSC 200 Introduction to Food Science and FDSC 624 Current Food Safety Issues.