Info

Jacob Lahne
Associate Professor of Food Science & Technology
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24060
jlahne at vt dot edu

About

I am a sensory scientist: I research how humans perceive the flavors of food products. I am particularly interested in the sensory perception of fermented products: cider, whiskey, kombucha, cheese, sourdough bread. I also develop and adapt data-analysis methods for dealing with data from sensory-evaluation experiments, which is typically multivariate, highly correlated, and non-parametric (or parameterized in some unknown way). These have lead me to become an enthusiastic (if clumsy!) R coder. Most of the material you’ll find linked here relates to learning or using R for analyzing these data.

Research

My Google Scholar profile is usually most up to date. Most of my research is available as open-access preprints indexed through Scholar.

• Incomplete Linking: a code repository for the paper “Analyzing larger sample sets with rapid methods: Incomplete-block designs with free-sorting and free-linking tasks.” Open-access pre-print is available through VTechWorks.
• Text-Mining Workflow: a code repository and presentation on text mining for Eurosense 2020.

Teaching

• Data Analytics for Food and Ag Science (2022): My first bookdown! A rendered version of course notes/handouts for FST 59845734.
• Eurosense Text Analysis Workshop (2022): A bookdown and tutorial walkthrough for sensory-related text analysis, presented at Eurosense 2022 (with Leah Hamilton).
• Pangborn Introduction to R Workshop (2023): A bookdown and tutorial for R for sensory scientists, presented by Leah Hamilton at Pangborn 2023.
• Sensometrics Better Data Visualization with R and ggplot2 Workshop (2024): A bookdown and tutorial for using ggplot2 to produce better sensory-science visualizations, presented with Leah Hamilton at Sensometrics 2024.

Other stuff

• The R Opus v2 (2024): Guide to practical and applied multivariate data analysis for sensory scientists, based on Hildegarde Heymann’s original (2015) guide.