The coffee has a new undeniably aroma in our office that it had not had in the past mornings.

Wilton Cardoso is a Professor that comes from Brazil, more specifically from Venda Nova do Imigrante, a municipality in the interior of the Espírito Santo state. He arrived in the beginning of October and will stay working in our research group for the next 3 months. The exchange has been possible due to a program from the Brazilian National Council of State Funding Agencies – CONFAP and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) that invites researchers from Brazil to pursue research collaborations with Principal Investigators already supported through European Research Council (ERC) grants.

Prof. Wilton Soares Cardoso is a Food engineer that works with coffee at Instituto Federal do Espírito Santo, in the Venda Nova do Imigrante campus. His research has been focused on evaluating the importance of fermentation during the coffee processing. Brazil is the largest producer and exporter of coffee in the world and the Espírito Santo region is known for its high quality coffee due to the mountains altitude and perfect climate. During his stay in our lab he is willing to develop news techniques that will help to analyze and evaluate coffee samples. The main goal is to apply the e-nose from the SCENT project in a different set of samples and distinguish different coffee fermentation processings.

As favourite hobbies he likes to play basketball and watch TV with his daughter. A perfect day for him is to stay at home, with family and dogs, having a special lunch. Hopefully he will not miss them so much since it is a short stay.

As a coffee expert, Prof. Wilton Cardoso grinds coffee beans before making his coffee and we are already thankful for the good coffee and special smell in the morning. Now we are looking foward to smell it even better, with proper physicochemical sensors in the lab.