ReferenceA map, a dataset, or a directory. It makes no recommendation.
Researchers & Scientists
This is the page that answers the question the research directory structurally cannot: not "who worked on sorghum" but "who is this person, what do they work on, and where do I find them." An academic looking for a malting enzymologist, a journalist looking for someone to quote, or a brewer looking for the person behind a paper all arrive needing the same thing, and none of them knows which grain page holds the answer.
Entries here are short by design. This page owns the person: who they are, where they work, and what they span. The research directory owns the work itself, subject by subject, and each entry links to it.
Page established 2026-08-25 · seeded from existing site entries; growing.
How to read it — entry rules, and what a listing means
One owner, but the reader never has to leave. The full description of a person or organization lives in exactly one place: the role page owns the person, the subject page owns the work. But a short identity travels with the name wherever it appears: who they are, where they work, and why they are named here, in a sentence or two. You should never have to click somewhere else to find out who someone is.
Organizations sit inside the role they perform. Research groups, institutes and federal units belong here alongside the people in them.
Described, never endorsed. A listing is a map reference, not a recommendation, and implies no relationship with this site. Listing someone does not mean they have endorsed this site or its positions.
What qualifies. A published body of work, a named research role, or a public programme.
Corrections and removals: contact us.
The roster — who does the science
Pointers to people the research directory already describes. The person and their span are named here; the work lives on the subject pages linked from each entry.
Glen Fox — UC Davis. Malting and brewing science across four of this family's grains. · sorghum, millet, rice, corn
John R.N. Taylor — University of Pretoria. The tropical-cereals canon: sorghum, maize, and teff. · sorghum, corn, teff
Elke Arendt — University College Cork. Gluten-free cereal science; senior author of the buckwheat malting corpus. · buckwheat, millet
Scott Bean — USDA-ARS Manhattan. Sorghum grain composition and protein chemistry. · sorghum
Martin Zarnkow — TU Munich, Weihenstephan. Gluten-free malting across proso millet and rice. · millet, rice
Scott Lafontaine — University of Arkansas. Flavor chemistry and alternative-malt economics. · rice, sorghum
R.C. Agu — brewing and distilling scientist. Malting and mashing of gluten-free cereals, from malted sorghum with added enzymes through germination-temperature work on rice and buckwheat. · external enzymes, internal enzymes
Geoff Palmer — Heriot-Watt University. Grain science and malting, and the sorghum program that housed the commercial-enzyme work. · external enzymes
Laurie Novellie — CSIR, South Africa. The founding figure of sorghum malt diastatic measurement, and the assay tradition the field still traces back to. · the Novellie/CSIR methods
Jane Dewar — South African malting scientist. Sorghum and pearl-millet malting, in the CSIR-to-Pretoria lineage. · millet
Barry McCleary — Megazyme's founder. Enzyme assay method development and standardization, and still publishing the methods themselves. · internal enzymes
Sten Aastrup — Novozymes. The producer side's named scientist: brewing application lead, and author of the industry's enzymes-in-brewing chapters and handbooks. · external enzymes
Edyta Kordialik-Bogacka — Łódź University of Technology. Commercial enzyme mixtures applied to unmalted pseudocereals. · quinoa and amaranth, external enzymes
Cockburn, Elias & Hopfer — Penn State University. The US gluten-free brewing research group; mashing-protocol and fermentable-sugar process science. · millet, sorghum
Escalona-Buendía, Romero-Medina & Verde-Calvo — Autonomous Metropolitan University, Mexico City. The biotechnology group carrying corn beer's most sustained research thread. · corn
Drew Budner — Coastal Carolina University, professor of chemistry. Aroma and yeast-strain chemistry of sorghum beer. · flavor and sensory, yeast and fermentation
Katherine Thompson-Witrick — University of Florida, food science and human nutrition. Fermented-beverage flavor chemistry across millet and sorghum. · millet, flavor and sensory
Bernardo Pontes Guimarães — University of Arkansas. Rice malting suitability and the cost modeling behind it. · rice
Sergio O. Serna-Saldívar — Tecnológico de Monterrey, Research Director at CB-FEMSA. Cereal science running through gluten-free grain processing generally, sorghum koji included. · koji and grown enzymes
Robert VanBuren — Michigan State University. Plant genomics of stress-resilient crops, teff among them. · teff
Zerihun Tadele — University of Bern, Institute of Plant Sciences. Group leader, and head of the Tef Improvement Project. · teff
Kebebew Assefa — Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, Debre Zeit. Ethiopia's national teff research coordinator. · teff
Humphrey C. Nzelibe — Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. The biochemist behind fonio's malting corpus. · fonio
Mark Tester — KAUST. Plant scientist working quinoa genomics and dryland agriculture. · quinoa and amaranth
Carlo Catassi — Università Politecnica delle Marche. Celiac clinical research: gluten thresholds and the gluten-related disorders. · celiac and health
Katharina A. Scherf — Technical University of Munich. Gluten chemistry, and the measurement of partially hydrolyzed gluten in fermented foods. · testing and certification
Eric A.E. Garber — FDA CFSAN. The federal food-analysis scientist working gluten in fermented and hydrolyzed foods. · testing and certification
Michelle L. Colgrave & Gregory J. Tanner — CSIRO. Mass-spectrometry quantification of cereal prolamins. · testing and certification
Patrick McGovern — University of Pennsylvania Museum. Archaeochemist; residue analysis of ancient fermented beverages. · traditional fermentation
Melinda Yerka — sorghum breeder. Described on Breeders & Agronomists
Seeded 2026-08-25, filled 2026-08-27. This page owns the people above; the research directory owns their work. Growing.
As the roster grows further it will subdivide by specialism: malting and enzyme science, grain quality and composition, genetics and genomics, brewing process and fermentation, flavor and sensory, clinical and analytical, and the research groups and federal units behind them.
Bodies & gatherings — the societies, journals and conferences this role runs through
Employers are not listed here. An affiliation belongs in the person's line above. These are the bodies a researcher in this field joins, submits to, attends, draws material from, or is measured against.
American Society of Brewing Chemists. The North American brewing methods body, and the framework any gluten-free malt specification would be written against. · ASBC · corn
Master Brewers Association of the Americas. The working brewers' technical body, the channel through which producer-side science actually reaches breweries. · external enzymes
The Chartered Institute of Brewers & Distillers. Formerly the IBD. Its Journal of the Institute of Brewing carries a large share of the literature indexed across this directory. · distilling
MEBAK. The Central European brewing analysis commission, the other methods tradition gluten-free malt work gets measured against. · rice · the evaluation-methods wing
Brewing Society of Japan. The field's academic society in Japan, and publisher of the Journal of the Brewing Society of Japan: the standing venue for koji science, much of which never reaches English-language brewing journals. · koji and grown enzymes
The Prolamin Working Group. Founded 1985 at the University of Leiden; the body that supplies the reference material behind gluten measurement worldwide, and issues the community's formal statements. · testing and certification
AOAC International. Publisher of the Journal of AOAC International, the venue where analytical methods for this problem are validated. · testing and certification
South African Bureau of Standards. Published SABS 235 in 1970, the diastatic-power standard for sorghum and millet malts, and with it the Sorghum Diastatic Unit — a national standards body writing a specification for a gluten-free malt. · the standard, documented
ICRISAT — International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. The global center for sorghum and millet germplasm and improvement, holding the deepest collection of sorghum genetic diversity in the world. · ICRISAT · sorghum
IRRI — International Rice Research Institute. The global center of rice science and germplasm, and the deepest research infrastructure behind any gluten-free brewing grain. · rice
CIMMYT — International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. The global maize center and germplasm bank, holding the genetic diversity of corn's home continent. · corn
MaizeGDB and the Maize Genetics Cooperation Stock Center. The crop's federal community database and the living collection behind it, both maintained with USDA-ARS support, shared infrastructure of a kind no gluten-free brewing grain has. · MaizeGDB · corn
The Maize Genetics Meeting. The crop's annual scientific gathering, running toward its seventieth year. · the meeting · corn
The Global Sorghum Conference. The field's international gathering of researchers, producers and industry; the 2026 conference runs September 14–18 in Lubbock, Texas. · sorghum
The International Buckwheat Research Association. The crop's own international scientific body, founded 1981 per its directory profile, with a standing symposium series, infrastructure no other grain in this family has. · buckwheat
The International Workshops on Tef. The field's convening tradition, running through Debre Zeit on a roughly decadal beat. · teff
United Sorghum Checkoff Program. The US producer board for this site's principal grain, and a research funder; its request for proposals is paused for 2026 pending evaluation. · sorghum
Working with them — how to approach a researcher
If you want the work rather than the person, it is already indexed subject by subject: grain by grain in the research directory, and by conversion route in the enzymes wing. Read the paper before writing to its author; most first questions are answered inside it.
If you are citing a method, the method families are documented side by side on the evaluation-methods wing. Which measurement tradition a number came from decides whether two malt figures can be compared at all.
If you have a question nobody has answered, that is worth more to this field than a request for advice. The research asks are written so a working brewhouse or a home kettle can run them, and the open problems list is where the gaps are kept.
Know which door you are knocking on. The same expertise sits behind different instruments: a federal intramural unit works through cooperative agreements rather than grant applications, a university takes grants or contracts, and an industry scientist may need clearance before speaking at all. The affiliation in each roster line is what tells you which.
If you have data rather than a question, publishable brewhouse records are the scarcest input in this category. The batch record and lot reporting formats exist so a result can leave your brewery in a form somebody else can use.
If what you need is a test rather than a study, that is a different role: labs & certifiers.
How this role connects — documented links to other roles and subjects
Every connection carries its own evidence link: no inferred relationships, no speculation.
- This role sits upstream of every other one on the site. The mash temperature a brewer holds, the acceptance criteria a maltster writes, and the claim a label makes all resolve to a published measurement, and where that measurement does not exist, the practice is convention. Why the 190°F baseline exists
- Researchers and breeders are one pipeline with two role pages. A malting trait is a research finding until a breeding program carries it into a released variety; the people doing the second half are on breeders & agronomists.
- The analytical dispute is shared with the labs. Whether an assay can find gluten in a fermented beer is a research question and a commercial service at once: the same methods, argued in journals and sold as a test. · testing and certification · labs & certifiers
- Clinical medicine sits upstream of a beer label. The celiac literature sets the exposure a gluten-free claim has to survive; the brewing literature only decides whether a given process meets it. · celiac and health · can you call it gluten-free
- With no industrial R&D department behind it, the experiments run in kitchens. This category's process work is disproportionately done by people not paid to do it, which makes the amateur layer a research constituency rather than an audience. · homebrewers & home maltsters
- Patient organizations here publish; they do not only advocate. Unusually for the sector, bodies listed on advocacy appear in this directory as authors of primary laboratory work. · testing and certification
- The measurement tradition is split by grain, not by discipline. Barley-derived methods mismeasure sorghum malt, which is why a separate sorghum assay lineage and a national standard exist at all, and why two honest numbers can disagree. · the method comparison
- One scientist commonly spans several grains; the grains do not span each other. The roster's overlaps (malting science across millet and rice, tropical cereals across sorghum, maize and teff) are how the small grains get studied at all: by people whose careers cross them. · the grain directories
- Federal science enters this field as a supplier of grain quality, not of beer. The USDA-ARS units named in the roster work composition, genetics and germplasm; a brewing specification would rest on their numbers, and none of those numbers is produced for a brewer. · sorghum
- The flavor wing is the newest and the emptiest. Most of this directory can answer will it convert. Very little of it can answer what will it taste like, and the people working that question are a handful. · flavor and sensory
- Traditional brewing is a research subject with living practitioners. The archaeology and microbiology of sorghum, millet and maize ferments is scholarship about processes people still run daily, which makes community partnership part of the method rather than a courtesy. · traditional fermentation
- The enzyme trade employs scientists and publishes like a field. Supplier technical literature is written by named researchers, which is why an industry affiliation appears in the roster beside the universities. · external enzymes
- Where the grain came from is a research question too. Cultivar identity, storage behavior and mycotoxin control are studied by the same people who study malting, and they are what a grower is actually being asked to guarantee. · grain source and acceptance
Who's missing — where this page's coverage runs out
- There is no gluten-free brewing research center anywhere. Every program in the roster has a different primary subject (cereal chemistry, plant genomics, celiac medicine, distilling) and reaches this category sideways. The nearest things to dedicated programs are a university group or two, which is why the literature is thin in patches no single institution is answerable for.
- Flavor and sensory is close to unstaffed. We have found one published quantitative descriptive sensory profile of a single gluten-free grain beer, and for several of the grains this site covers no published flavor or volatile characterization in a brewing context at all. · flavor and sensory
- The map follows the English-language journals. African, Asian and Latin American scholarship on these grains is substantial and is under-represented here, because much of it publishes in venues the brewing indexes do not carry. Where we know such a venue exists (Japan's brewing society journal is the clearest case), we have listed the venue and not its contents.
- This page names people; it does not route to them. Identifier lines say who someone is and where they work. Contact details, current availability, and whether anyone is taking questions at all are outside what a directory can honestly hold.
- Corrections are the mechanism. If your work is described wrongly, filed under the wrong specialism, or absent, that is a defect we would rather hear about than leave standing. · contact us
Work on this science, or know whose work we've missed? Tell us.