The Biomaterials Discovery Programme Grant held their seminar on Thursday 25 October and Valentina Cuzzocoli Crucitti gave a talk as part of this series.
Valentina’s talk was entitled: “Food waste: waste less to feed more. The inefficiency of the Food Chain Supply.” She highlighted that a third of all of the food that is produced on our planet never reaches the table. The food supply chain is complex and food is wasted/lost at the production, distribution and consumer level. In particular, most food losses are during the distribution where contamination, poor transport infrastructure and storage decrease food quality which makes it unfit for human consumption. This problem raised different questions: Where should technology’s focus be on reducing food wastage? What can we do better?
Valentina is a PhD Student on the EPSRC Programme Grant in Next Generation Biomaterials Discovery in the Faculty of Engineering. Her main supervisor is Derek Irvine. Valentina joined the project in 2016 working on Continuous Sustainable Synthesis of Polymeric Resins for use in the Construction of 3D structures. She was mainly associated with Research Challenge 2 of the Programme Grant initially (Systems Based Advanced Drug Delivery) and is increasingly linked to Research Challenge 3 (Advanced Materials for 3D Stem Cell Differentiation and Regenerative Medicine).
It was a good opportunity to hear Valentina speak about something which interests her and for the Programme Grant team to get together. Needless to say, no pizza went to waste after this talk!
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