Dr Sáenz-Navajas

Dr Sáenz-Navajas has bachelor degrees in Chemistry and Enology from La Rioja University. She went on to complete a PhD (year 2011) on wine sensory interactions and non-volatile sensory-active molecules driving wine quality at the same University. The PhD involved innovative work on sensory interactions in wines by construction/deconstruction strategies combining sensory and chemical sciences. 

She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Flavor and Feed Sciences in Dijon, France, from 2011 to 2013, where she acquired expertise in Sensory and Consumer Science. She visited the University of California Davis (Prof. Dr. Waterhouse Lab) in 2016, and the University of Adelaide in 2022 (A/Prof D. Jeffery). 

From 2013 to 2020, Dr Sáenz-Navajas worked at Universidad de Zaragoza at Laboratorio de Análisis del Aroma y Enología, at Prof. Ferreira´s lab, where her research was focused on the development of conceptual, instrumental and methodological tools for the modelling of flavour.

Since 2021 she is tenured research scientist at The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and develops her research at the Institute of Grapevine and Wine Sciences, in La Rioja, Spain, where in collaboration with her former lab at University of Zaragoza, continues her research line following a multidisciplinary approach focused on modelling wine flavour from sensory-active molecules, and trying to understand how these molecules interact with the consumer to form the overall perception, by employing strategies derived from psychology, psychophysics, chemistry and enology.