The Laboratory of Food Technology is one of the seven research groups of the Centre for Food and Microbial Technology, Department Microbial and Molecular systems, and is located at the Campus Arenberg in Leuven. The research mission of the Laboratory of Food Technology is to understand and quantify process-structure-function relations of food systems during processing, preservation and storage by optimal exploitation of the endogenous potential of fruit- ,vegetable- and legume-derived systems, both for developed and for developing countries. They do this on a daily basis through a joint effort of 25 co-workers and 15 MSc. students.
Within LFT, Prof. Tara Grauwet leads a research team (1 post-doc; 7 PhD students; 7 MSc. students) which studied until now majorly process-structure-health relations of food systems. In other words, the research includes in silico and in vitro digestion and bio-accessibility studies to understand how food structure can be steered to influence/optimize nutrient bio-accessibility and digestion of foods. For this, the lab acquired an international reputation on the use of static up to semi-dynamic models to simulate digestion in vitro, and developed a solid analytical platform to quantify digestion on a molecular level. For more information on the research aims of LFT, we kindly refer to our website: https://www.biw.kuleuven.be/m2s/clmt/lmt or our social media pages: https://twitter.com/labfoodtech; https://www.linkedin.com/company/86172867.
The Laboratory of Food Technology (LFT) is looking for a PhD candidate to work on the design of food systems for populations with specific nutritional needs, a research topic funded by VLAIO (ICON project).
A lot of research on how food formulation and processing can be used to impact the macronutrient digestion functionality. To establish these process-structure-digestive function relations, in vitro models have proven their potential. However, the commonly used in vitro models often represent the physiological conditions of the healthy adult, while the society consists of many other (sub-) populations with distinct physiological conditions as part of the digestive tract (e.g. elderly, IBS patients, children, people with obesity). Through interaction with a project partner strong in documenting in vivo digestive conditions of specific subpopulations, this PhD work will focus on the translation of those to in vitro models to build case-specific simulation platform. In this work, these adapted models will be used to develop food (supplement) systems through formulation and processing that meet better the need of these populations.
Your work will focus on:
Your responsibilities will be:
We are looking for a PhD candidate who should fulfil the following requirements:
We offer:
The start date can be negotiated to be any time between August, 15th and October, 1th, 2024.
Applications (in English) should include:
-CV (contact details, education, work experience, prizes/awards, language skills, etc,...)
-Official academic transcript of BSc. and MSc. studies
-Motivational letter describing research career goals, skills and experience
-Full contact details of two reference persons
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