Cellular Agriculture: Lab Grown Foods

Dilek Ercili-Cura is a Senior Specialist at Solar Foods, a food-tech company that develops a sustainable protein source for human consumption. She completed her doctoral studies in food sciences within the Marie Curie Host Fellowship project, “Enzymatic Tailoring of Protein Interactions and Functionalities in Food Matrix (PRO-ENZ).” For the past 13 years, she has worked as a scientist at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland Ltd. in close contact with academic institutions and the food industry globally. Her work is focused on the techno-functional properties of proteins, biomaterial characterization, and solutions for a resource-efficient food chain including valorization of agri-food industry byproducts and cellular agriculture concepts, especially lab-cultured proteins and microbial biomass. Together with the Solar Foods team, she is currently developing the versatile food ingredient Solein®, a single cell protein produced from air and electricity.

Dorothee Barth is a Senior Scientist in the Computational Biology group at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. She has a background in engineering cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart (Germany) and a PhD in control engineering, and she has applied these principles in biotechnology for the past 15 years. She has years of experience working in labs cultivating various microorganisms and analyzing the data, performing mathematical modeling and optimization of biotechnological systems. Currently, she is leading a jointly funded project advancing CO2 utilization through biotechnology, specifically through gas fermentation and microalgae.