The Flavor Research and Education Center would like to congratulate Maggie Jilek on graduating with her Doctorate on August 30th, 2016. Maggie’s research focused on the development of a solid state NMR platform to study the interactions between flavors and food matrix materials. The platform provides the ability to study both the structure and dynamics of flavor to matrix interactions in situ and evaluate the impact of matrix changes on these interactions. Her research confirmed the presence of preferential intermolecular interactions between flavors and food matrix materials. This platform also predicted changes to flavor release, as a result of texture changes in the matrix, not predicted using traditional flavor release models.