Jacob Lahne

Jacob Lahne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on sensory evaluation of foods, particularly fermented and distilled beverages like cider, whiskey, and kombucha, with an emphasis on developing novel data analysis methods for multivariate sensory datasets.

• Ph.D., Animal, Nutrition, and Food Sciences, University of Vermont (2014)
• M.S., Food Science and Human Nutrition, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign (2010)
• B.A., Mathematics, Oberlin College (2006)

Dr. Lahne's work bridges sensory science with computational tools, including R programming and Natural Language Processing. He has led workshops on data visualization with ggplot2 and created open-access educational materials like Teaching Data Analytics for Food and Ag Science (2022) and Text-Mining Workflow (Eurosense 2020).

His current projects include analyzing Virginia hard cider sensory profiles and integrating food science with food studies scholarship.