Professor, Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia.

María Ximena Quintanilla Carvajal is a Full Professor at the Universidad de La Sabana and Senior Researcher at Minciencias. She studied her Doctorate in Food Sciences at the National School of Biological Sciences of the National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico and is an Agro Industrial Production Engineer from the Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia. Her research topics are based on the development of functional foods from micro and nanoencapsulation, spray drying, image analysis and computer vision systems, as well as different types of microscopies such as optical, confocal and scanning and various homogenization techniques including microfluidization. She completed a postdoctoral stay as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Massachusetts in order to test the bioavailability and bioavailability of compounds of interest in food. She has been the author of more than 45 research papers in Indexed journals and has more than 10 patent requests and one invention patent granted.