Eric Decker, research professor of food science in the College of Natural Sciences, has been honored with the Chevreul Medal, the highest honor in his field of lipid food chemistry.

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The award, sponsored by the French Society for the Study of Lipids, was presented to Decker recently at the EuroLipid Federation meetings in Leipzig, Germany.

Named in honor of Michel Eugène Chevreul, a pioneer in lipid and organic chemistry, the annual award recognizes a French scientist and a scientist outside of France who have made significant contributions to the development of knowledge or industrial achievements in the field of fats and oils.

Decker was honored for his research into free radical oxidation of lipids and mechanisms of antioxidants in numerous food systems. He gave a plenary lecture at the EuroFed meeting on “Lipid Oxidation in the Lag Phase: The Key to Understanding Shelf-Life.”

“Over the last 30 years, I have had the pleasure of doing collaborative research with many institutions across the world, including in European countries such as France, England, Italy, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands,” Decker says. “I am deeply touched to be honored by these colleagues through this very prestigious award, especially at a time when research on the stability of seed oils is so critical for food safety.”

Named among the world’s most highly cited scientists in agriculture every year since 2005, Decker retired last summer after 32 years at UMass Amherst, including 12 years as head of the food science department. He will remain active with a three-year appointment to complete his work. 

Over the years, he has served on committees of the FDA, Institute of Medicine, Institute of Food Technology, USDA and American Heart Association.

His research aims to characterize mechanisms of lipid oxidation, antioxidant protection of foods and the health implications of bioactive lipids. These efforts focus on improving nutrition by incorporating more stable, unsaturated fatty acids into foods while preventing oxidative rancidity that causes food waste.

The Chevreul Medal is the latest of many top honors Decker has received in recent years. In 2024, the UMass Amherst Food Science Advisory Board recommended the establishment of the Eric Decker Food Science Scholar Fund, an endowment that names an Eric A. Decker Food Science Scholar, a five-year appointment to advance the research of leading food scientists at UMass Amherst. In 2022, he received the Nils Foss Excellence Prize, awarded by FOSS, a multinational food tech company based in Denmark; and the International Association of Dietetic Nutrition and Safety Lifetime Achievement Award. He received two prestigious honors in 2021, the American Oil Chemists’ Society’s Supelco/Nicholas Pelick Research Award and the Institute of Food Technologist’s (IFT) Lifetime Achievement Award in Honor of French inventor Nicolas Appert.

Decker is the second UMass Amherst food scientist to receive the Chevreul Medal, which has been bestowed annually since 1963. Wassef Nawar, a world-renowned lipid chemistry food scientist who spend his entire career at UMass Amherst and died in 2023, won the award in 1994.