Computational Gastronomy for Sustainable Protein Recipe Innovation

PhD Program Overview

The Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein at Imperial College London, in collaboration with the Chemical Kitchen, the Dyson School of Design Engineering and the Department of Computing, is offering a fully funded PhD opportunity focused on computational gastronomy for sustainable protein recipe innovation.

Research Focus

• Multimodal embedding architecture: designing and training a heterogeneous graph neural network integrating flavour chemistry, ISO 11036 sensory measurement, functional and process behaviour, and USDA-grade nutritional composition.
• Cold-start for novel proteins: developing methods to localise sustainable proteins with no culinary history in cuisine-specific embedding space.
• Chef-measured sensory benchmark: building the first open chef-measured sensory dataset for sustainable proteins under ISO 11036.
• Real-world deployment and pop-ups: deploying the trained model into KAIKAKU.AI’s production Epicure system during the Year-3 placement.

Supervisory Team

Principal Investigator: Jakub Radzikowski. Co-supervisors: Elena Dieckmann, Chiraag Lala. Industry supervisors: Jakub Radzikowski, Josef Chen.