Neural Mechanisms in Taste

Robert H. Cagan, Ph.D. is Associate Director, Flavors and Fragrances and Life Sciences Research, at the Colgate-Palmolive Company. Previously, he held joint positions on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the Monell Chemical Senses Center, and the Veterans Administration Medical Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While in Philadelphia he taught Biochemistry and held key research and administrative positions, including heading the Biochemistry Program at the Monell Center. His educational background includes a B.S., magna cum laude, in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Harvard University. He was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow in Biochemistry/Biophysics at the Nobel Medical Institute of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden prior to joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. In his present position, Dr. Cagan is responsible for fragrance development and fragrance quality for the Colgate-Palmolive Company throughout the world, and he directs life sciences research toward applications in a number of product categories. Dr. Cagan has published extensively in Biochemistry and Neurobiology, especially in the chemical senses. He has been elected to membership in the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Society for Neurochemistry, the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, and Sigma Xi and Tau Beta Pi, and he is a member of several other professional societies. He has served on a number of committees, including those for the National Institutes of Health. He has contributed in an editorial capacity for the journals Nutrition Reviews and the American Journal of Otolaryngology. He was a Byron Riegel Lecturer at Northwestern University in 1979 and the Manheimer Lecturer at the Monell Center in 1988. In 1983, Dr. Cagan was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1989, he received the first annual Award for Research Excellence in Taste, sponsored by Frito-Lay, from the Association for Chemoreception Sciences.