Dr. Mian Nadeem Riaz serves as the Associate Department Head of the Texas A&M Food Science Department and is the holder of the IFANCA Professorship in Food Diversity. He joined the university 30 years ago after completing his PhD in Food Science from the University of Maine. He served as the Director of the Food Protein R&D center from 2005 to 2020 at A&M. Currently, he is the Director of Extrusion Technology where he offers 5 extrusion courses every year.
He teaches the popular food science course, “Religious and Ethnic Foods”, with more than 1,000 enrolled students each semester, which is a capstone in the IFANCA Food Diversity Innovation Program that he established from a $5 million endowment from IFANCA. He uses his expertise in extrusion and food diversity to publish 7 books, 27 book chapters, 160 papers, and has given over 600 talks in 60 different countries. His book titled “Halal Food Production” is used in universities for food science students and has been translated into Chinese, Persian, and Korean.
He established two food processing centers in his native country of Pakistan at two Universities with the USAID program.
