Bruce Hamaker named Director of the Whistler Center

Bruce R. Hamaker, an internationally recognized authority on sorghum as a food grain, is the new Director of Purdue University's Whistler Center for Carbohydrate Research.  Dr. Hamaker replaces James N. BeMiller, who was hired by Purdue University to establish a food carbohydrate research center in 1986 and has been its only Director to date.

Dr. Hamaker also heads the cereals laboratory of the  Whistler Center and the Department of Food Science.  His research covers cereal product digestibility and cereal product and component functionality.  It is focused on maize/corn, sorghum, and rice.  Recent research on corn starch has covered associated proteins, fine structure-functionality relationships, a three-component complex, and slowly digesting starch.

Dr. Hamaker, a Professor in Purdue's Department of Food Science, was a member of the team that earned Purdue's School of  Agriculture Team Award (for research on sorghum) in 1998, received the university’s Agricultural Research Award in 2000, and was named a University Faculty Scholar in 2002.  He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel of the American Association of Cereal Chemists and the US AID-funded INTSORMIL CRSP Technical Committee.  He is a past Associate Editor of Cereal Chemistry and a past Chair of the Carbohydrate Division of the Institute of Food Technologists .

He received a B.S. degree in Biological Sciences from Indiana University in 1977, a M.S. degree in Human Nutrition from Purdue University (after a stint with the Peace Corps in Liberia ) in 1983, and a Ph.D. in Cereal Chemistry from Purdue in 1986.  He then spent two years as a Post-doctoral Research Associate in a nutrition institute associated with Johns Hopkins University in Lima , Peru and was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Food Science, University of Arkansas.  He returned to Purdue in 1992 to take over leadership of Purdue’s cereals laboratory from the late Allan Kirleis.