Dr. Jette Feveile Young completed her Master’s in 1994 and her Ph.D. in 1996. Her 25-year research career has focused on muscle cell models and muscle physiology – leading her in recent years to the field of cultivated meat, as an innovative approach to more sustainable meat production.

She holds as a very strong and active research position in Denmark within her research fields of nutrition and meat science, with considerable joint publications and applications with researchers and industrial partners.

Over the past six years Jette Feveile Young has been granted a portfolio of projects amounting to ca. 51 M DKK (7 M Euro), The funding stems from a variety of sources: national and international public and private funds and companies, a Nordic foundation, EU funding and a private philanthropic source.

Jette is focused on AU FOOD’s research on cultivated meat:

“I am looking forward to expanding our laboratory facilities and activities in the cultivated meat research area and further the required interdisciplinary research within this field. Research in my group will span from cell production conditions including the use of side streams from food and biomasses for growing the cells to scaling, quality and functionality of the cultivated meat product as well as its taste and nutritional value. We will ensure Aarhus University takes a leading position in future food solutions within cellular agriculture”, she says.

Jette has a significant focus on talent development and has been heavily involved in teaching programs and has supervised dozens of thesis students on their projects, including bachelor’s master’s and PhD’s.

Since 2011, Jette has been the leader of the ‘Differentiated and Biofunctional Food’ Science Team at AU FOOD.

Marianne Hammershøj completed her Master’s in 1992 and her PhD in 2001. In her research, she has focused on food structure and functionality, primarily within eggs, egg products, milk and dairy products. More recently she has broadened her research towards plant-based products, and specifically focused on the impact of primary production and various processing technologies on food and ingredient quality.

She has been leading 10 interdisciplinary and collaborative projects predominantly within dairy, egg quality, and egg-based products. This demonstrates scientific leadership and a strong ability to provide guidance to research colleagues.

She is also an active project participant within numerous projects focusing on vegan cheese, dairy proteins for flexitarian diets, organic production of poultry, sustainable egg productions and egg quality, organic milk production, functional properties of algae, valorization of side streams, protein sources of mussels, potato proteins, and seaweed.

Marianne Hammershøj has considerable teaching experience and is responsible for both bachelor’s and master’s courses within Food structure, functions, enzymes and food microbiology areas. She has also supervised numerous student projects. Since July 2021 she has led the Science Team ‘Food Technology’ at AU FOOD, which currently has 44 employed staff.

“Our foods of tomorrow are changing due to agendas on climate impact, growing populations, and requirements of longer shelf life. Hence, it is essential that food quality goes hand-in-hand with the exploring of new raw materials, production systems and processing technologies. Building knowledge as food scientists in understanding the interplay between molecular structures and food properties is crucial for success in development of new desirable foods to all of us as consumers”.

Trine Kastrup Dalsgaard completed her master’s in 2002 and her PhD in 2008. Her research is specialised in proteins from novel food sources and focuses on producing high quality novel food proteins and biorefinery, including optimisation of extraction technologies.

She has a solid base in animal-based foods but has moved into proteins from leafy legumes such as alfalfa and clovers, legume seed as pea, proteins from seaweed and CO2, and expanding into the more sustainable vegan and plant-based food products.

Her research activities demonstrate a considerable volume of joint publications and applications with researchers and industrial partners nationally and internationally. She frequently leads consortium-based projects and has been successful in securing ca. 260 M DKK (35 M Euro) of research funding.

“When we are biorefining new biomass to produce food ingredients it is important to valorize the whole biomass. Therefore, we focus on the circular bioeconomy perspective in which cascading, and the use of side streams is extremely important. Besides protein, we characterize and evaluate the content of other constituents like natural colorants, lipids and carbohydrates, and also consider how to secure the circularity of nutrients to obtain sustainable food systems. We are using a number of techniques to evaluate the quality of novel food ingredients, but one of our finest tools is highly advanced mass spectrometry”

Trine  Kastrup Dalsgaard has considerable teaching experience, and she contributes to both bachelor’s and master’s courses and is responsible for the bachelor’s course Food Chemistry. She has also demonstrated considerable supervision experience, specifically as primary supervisor for 15 PhD students, 16 Master students and 26 Bachelor thesis students, in addition she has supervised several postdocs, research assistants, and exchange students.