John E. Hayes
Associate Professor, and Director
John Hayes is an Associate Professor of Food Science, and Director of the Sensory Evaluation Center, at Penn State. His research team studies why people choose to eat specific foods, including spicy foods, vegetables, and alcoholic beverages. His areas of expertise are human psychophysics, taste biology, food choice, ingestive behavior, and consumer acceptability. He earned a BS and MS in Food Science from Cornell University and a PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut before completing a postdoctoral fellowship in behavioral genetics and alcohol addiction at Brown University.
Dr. Hayes has published 100+ peer reviewed articles and his work has been covered in national and international media including NPR All Things Considered and Morning Edition, The Guardian, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal. He has received multiple national and international awards for his work, including the Barry Jacobs Award for research in human psychophysics, and the Ajinomoto Award for an outstanding junior scientist in the field of gustation, both from the Association for Chemoreception Sciences (AChemS), the Food Quality and Preference Researcher of the Future Award, and the Rose Marie Pangborn Sensory Science Scholarship. Dr. Hayes has received competitive funding from the US National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Agriculture, and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, as well as commodity groups and industrial partners. He currently serves as a Section Editor of the journal Physiology & Behavior, and is Chair of the Executive Committee for the Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium.
