Research and teaching often take faculty members to the far corners of the earth but seldom result in such high acclaim as received this fall in China by food science professor Charles Shoemaker.

During a ceremony in October in the People's Great Hall in Beijing, Shoemaker was awarded the Friendship Award, China's highest award for foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to China's economic and social progress. He was one of only two academics among 50 recipients from 20 countries.

The honor was the culmination of a 20-year friendship and working relationship among Shoemaker, the Department of Food Science and Technology, and colleagues in the People's Republic of China.

"To have that level of recognition from a people and country that I respect and enjoy so much was really nice," said Shoemaker, whose ties to China formed in the early 1980s. That year, two faculty members visited UC Davis from the Wuxi Institute of Light Industry, which has since grown to become Jiangnan University in eastern China.

"They were among the first academics to come out of China as visitors," he recalled.

Shoemaker and his wife, Sharon, had the opportunity to lecture at the Wuxi campus in 1985, and the relationship between the two food science departments flourished. He and the late Professor Bor Luh and other UC Davis food scientists maintained connections with their China colleagues, even through China's turbulent times during late 1980s.

Out of those relationships grew the International Conference of Food Science and Technology. The international meeting was first held in 1991 and has since been convened seven times in China for a global exchange of new ideas and research among several hundred food scientists.

As Shoemaker's research moved into rice-related studies, he found his connection to China was further strengthened. A food chemist, he has conducted research on the chemistry of the starches found in rice.

"Rice is the only grain that primarily is used directly as a food, rather than a food ingredient," Shoemaker said. "We're trying to take rice apart and find new markets and higher values for rice farmers in California, which is the second largest rice-producing state in the U.S.

"For example food companies like to use rice as an ingredient in products like energy bars because consumers seem to have the perception that rice is more wholesome than other grains like wheat or corn," Shoemaker said.

He has had six students from the Peoples Republic of China visit his UC Davis laboratory to participate in his rice research program. In turn, he and his wife have taken UC Davis graduate students to the international conferences in China and now hope to create opportunities for UC Davis students to study for at least a quarter in China's university food science programs.

"The future of the food industry is international," said Shoemaker. He noted, for example, that the KFC restaurant chain already does approximately one-third of its business in the Peoples Republic of China, tapping into that country's consumer market of more than 1.3 billion people.

For Shoemaker, one highlight of receiving the China Friendship Award was discovering that he was one of three recipients with Aggie ties.

During the gathering of award winners, Shoemaker met Robert Fontaine, a Davis native who earned a bachelor's degree in entomology and a doctor of medicine degree from UC Davis, graduating first in his class in 1972 from the UC Davis Schoool of Medicine. Fontaine has gone on to become a senior epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For several years, he has been assisting the Chinese in establishing epidemiologic capacity to detect and respond to threats to the public health, including infectious diseases, environmental hazards and non-communicable diseases.

In fact, Fontaine comes from quite an Aggie family. His father, Russell Edgar Fontaine, was a Cooperative Extension entomologist at UC Davis and his sister, brother and one son are UC Davis graduates. Another son, Nicholas Fontaine, is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Also receiving a China Friendship Award was water expert Richard Reidinger, who early in his career served as a postdoctoral fellow in UC Davis' Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, working with the late Professor Robert Hagan. Reidinger was honored for introducing the concept of self-financed irrigation and drainage districts to China, based on California's water delivery system.

Before returning to the U.S. with their Friendship Award plaques and gold medallions, Shoemaker, Fontaine, Reidinger and the other award winners toured the expansive new facilities that will house the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

"It felt like we were bringing home 'the gold' a year early," Shoemaker said with a smile.