Artificial Intelligence Platform for Lipid Functionality in Food Products

To see further information as well as how to apply, please refer to the full advert on the University of Leeds website – Artificial Intelligence Platform for Lipid Functionality in Food Products

One full scholarship for four years is available in the School of Food Science and Nutrition in 2025. This scholarship is open to UK and international applicants and covers full tuition fees plus £19,237 (2024/25 rate) maintenance per year (plus enhanced top-up stipend of £1,540 per year).

This fully funded PhD place provides an exciting opportunity to pursue postgraduate research in a range of fields relating to Food Science, Food Engineering and Data Analytics with the industry partner Nestlé.

The award is open to full-time or part-time candidates who have been offered a place on a PhD degree at the School of Food Science and Nutrition and in collaboration with Nestlé as part of the Food Consortium Collaborative Training Partnership (providing additional cohort training activities).

International applicants: please note that any costs associated with your arrival at the University of Leeds to start your PhD, including flights, visa costs, Immigration Health Surcharge and medical insurance are not covered under this studentship.

Lipids are common components in many food products and a greater understanding on how their origin and structure determine key physical and chemical properties is required to develop new food products with enhanced nutritional, quality, environment and economic profiles. 

This interdisciplinary project will include experimental and computational work, combining lipid and data science with a focus on developing an AI platform to identify relationships between lipid structure, chemical and physical properties and ultimately their performance in food products. The AI platform will be used to:

• Prepare oil blends with specific fatty acids composition, e.g. formulation of new products and diets.
• Compare fats and oils chemical and physical properties, e.g., need to replace existing oils and/or oil blends with cost competitive ones and/or improved nutritional ones.
• Calculate nutritional indexes, e.g., index of atherogenicity.
• Predict physical oil and/or oil blends properties (crystallization, melting point, creaminess, etc.)
• Predict chemical oil and/or oil blends stability, using primary and secondary oxidation product analysis).
• Integration with existing external lipid platforms (e.g., lipidomics data, clinical trials etc.). to extract and predict lipid behaviour and metabolism using AI tools.

The project will utilise existing datasets available from the industry partner and from literature augmented with experimental data collected in the laboratories at the University of Leeds. 

We are looking for a highly motivated candidate with a degree in data science, computer science, food science, Chemistry or Maths with a passion for interdisciplinary world changing research.