Karen Scaich

“Foods are not Black Boxes: They behave according to fundamental laws of chemistry and physics.” This formulation developed by Professor Karen Scaich is rightly known as Schaich’s Law. It happens to be just one of a number of original, innovative approaches to creative problem solving she has taught over the past seventeen years to her enthusiastic and admiring students in Food Science. Now, the point of Schaich’s Law is that to be able to understand and control foods, one must find the science underlying food behaviors. And that is precisely what Karen Schaich has been helping her students realize over the years in a large array of stimulating courses, all of which feature an applications part in which the theoretical portion of each lecture is tethered to some real-life problems.

An expert in lipid chemistry and all aspects of free radicals in foods and tissues, Professor Schaich is a recent winner of Rutgers’ Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching. Beyond the traditional university classroom, Karen Schaich has played an energetic role in mentoring teaching assistants, bringing the Food Science College Bowl and Product Development teams to national prominence, and enhancing the opportunities at Cook College for continuing education for industry. An alumnus sums up: “as soon as [Professor Schaich] steps into the room, you sense her enthusiasm and eagerness to teach….she makes high-level chemistry easy to understand through real life connections….I truly have known no other professor who matches her.”