Rate My Professor Hanna Tuomisto

Hanna Tuomisto is a Professor in the Department of Agricultural Sciences at the University of Helsinki, where she serves as Professor of sustainable food systems and leads the Future Sustainable Food Systems research group. She earned an MSc in Agroecology from the University of Helsinki in 2007 and a PhD in Biology from the University of Oxford in 2011, with her doctoral research examining the environmental impacts of contrasting farming systems, including organic, conventional, and integrated approaches. Following her PhD, Tuomisto worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre from 2011 to 2015, contributing to the development of farm-level carbon calculators and environmental footprint methods for agriculture and food sectors. From 2016 to 2017, she held a postdoctoral position at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, focusing on the intersections of environmental change, nutrition, and health in the Future of Nutrition and Health project. She currently holds an external position at the Natural Resources Institute Finland since September 2018 and is affiliated with the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science.

Tuomisto’s research centers on sustainable food systems, with expertise in life cycle assessment, sustainable farming systems, carbon footprinting, cellular agriculture, and novel foods. She has been assessing the environmental impacts of cell-cultured foods, such as cultivated meat, since 2008 and leads multidisciplinary projects evaluating sustainability across livestock production, plant-based proteins, dietary changes, vertical farming, and novel technologies. Her contributions advance consequential impact assessments often overlooked in traditional methods. Key publications include “A systematic review of sustainable food systems identifies socio-economic pathways driving food systems transformations” (2026, Nature Food), “Discretionary foods have notable environmental and expenditure relevance across meat and plant protein preferences” (2026, npj science of food), “Improving the carbon footprint assessment of milk production: a case study integrating soil carbon stock changes with eddy covariance and DeNitrification-DeComposition model” (2026, International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment), and earlier works like “Environmental impacts of cultivated meat” and “Climate Impacts of Cultured Meat and Beef Cattle” (2019). Tuomisto supervises doctoral programmes in Food Chain and Health, Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences, and Sustainable Use of Renewable Natural Resources, has served as opponent and pre-examiner for dissertations, and delivered over 55 invited talks, including keynotes on cultivated meat impacts. In 2022, she received the Research Achievement Award.