Dr. Paul Smeets is senior researcher at the Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University and Associate professor at the UMC Utrecht Brain Center, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He trained in Behavioral Biology after which he started his career in food-related neuroimaging with MRI at the Image Sciences Institute (UMC Utrecht) in 2002, already in collaboration with Wageningen University. A central theme in his research are the decisions that govern eating behaviors such as food choice, meal initiation and meal termination. These are taken in the brain on the basis of multiple neural as well as hormonal signals that reflect various determinants of eating such as sensory signaling, hunger state, stomach contents, appetite-related gut hormones, food reward and food-related cognitions. In recent years he has been expanding an innovative research area focused on the development and cross-disciplinary application of novel MRI techniques to monitor the behavior of food in the stomach, its digestion and associated physiological effects.
He is Associate Editor at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) and the Nutritional Neuroscience journal.