Food Engineering Research Lab

The dynamic bio-geophysical nature of food underpins the necessity of a sound food system that confers access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food in order to maintain a healthy and active lifestyle. At present, the increasing global population, climate change, shrinking water and land resources, increasing biodiversity losses, soil degradation and geopolitical system have made our food systems more vulnerable. From the Stone Age to our Modern era, food process engineering has provided solutions and required interventions to maintain the balance and dynamism of food safety and security. It has helped to build the capacity of our food system to meet the need of safe and nutritious food for the masses. But to sustain this it requires an inevitable integration with biotechnology. New developments in biotechnology have provided groundbreaking solutions in the field of food production and with continued advancements, it will become an integral part of our food system. The diffusion of knowledge, tools and technologies between food process engineering and biotechnology has opened several domains of interdisciplinary research that deal with food not only at its macro level but also at its molecular level.

Short Bio

Dr. Ashutosh Singh is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Guelph. He obtained his B.Tech. (Biotechnology) degree from Vellore Institute of Technology, India in 2007, his M.Sc. (Bioresource Engineering), and his Ph.D. (Bioresource Engineering) from McGill University in 2010 and 2014 respectively. Before joining the University of Guelph, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University (2014-2015) and later joined McGill University as a Research Associate.

Research Interests

Dr. Singh's research work involves the development of novel food processing methods and the use of physical, chemical, engineering, bioinformatics and biotechnological tools to improve our limited understanding of the nutritional component of food at the molecular level. In recent years his research group has expanded the research areas to include the development of non-destructive food quality and safety testing techniques using ATR-FTIR and NIR. His research group also works in the area of design, fabrication and application of microfluidic electrochemical biosensors, Quartz-Crystal Microbalance (QCM) biosensors and colorimetric biosensors to identify food allergens and toxins.