VIP Ingredients: Valorising Innovative Plant Ingredients - Naturally Generated Resource Extracts, Delivering Indigenous & Essential Nutrition Through Sustainability

About the Project

Project Key Words: Digital agriculture, computer vision, food

Post summary

The SETU Department of Land Sciences is looking for a PhD student to work on their VIP ingredients project. Funded by the Irish Department of Food, Agriculture and the Marine, VIP Ingredients aims to utilise precision farming, digitally enhanced processing technology, and functionality testing to extract innovative plant-based ingredients from Irish grown fava bean, pea, lupin and oats, for food applications.

The SETU team will be tasked with assessing the feasibility of a variety of vision / digital systems to identify parameters of interest (PoE’s) or biological markers across a variety of crops (in-field) for feature extraction potential. These key parameters of interest (PoE’s) will form a digital foundation on which to improve processing and increase national food security.

The successful PhD candidate will be part of SETU’s team and will work on conducting field and shelf-life mapping using AI-driven image analysis and sensors to support quality-specific decision-making. Main tasks will include:

• Apply digital imaging techniques on data captured from drones and in-field analysis to identify points of interest, determine digital vegetation index, digital plant health and yield, and estimate composition.
• Complete commercial profiling assessing intrinsic and extrinsic factors impacting product/ingredient readiness.
• Digitally map product shelf-life, through a series of product/ingredient or supply route-specific, temporal, and dynamic profile conditions.

The student will part of a wider national team and collaborate with other researchers and students in Teagasc, UCC, UCD and Irish food and agricultural companies.

The PhD will be fully funded for 4 years and the scholarship will cover University fees and a stipend of €25,000 tax free per year.