Bath Engineering & Design Studentships: FARM: Food-cell Adaptation, Reprogramming and Manufacturing

This project is one of a number in competition for a studentship from the Faculty of Engineering and Design at the University of Bath. If successful, this studentship is expected to commence 04 October 2027.

An alternative start date may be possible if agreed with your intended supervisors and the Doctoral College.

The UK food system relies heavily on livestock-derived products, particularly meat and dairy, which contribute significantly to the agricultural economy but also drive substantial greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water demand, and vulnerability to climate and supply-chain pressures. Cellular agriculture offers an alternative route to producing animal-derived foods by growing and engineering mammalian cells directly under controlled biomanufacturing conditions.

The FARM project (Food-cell Adaptation, Reprogramming and Manufacturing) will develop mammalian cell lines engineered for scalable cellular agriculture, relevant to both cultivated meat and cell-based dairy production. Rather than focusing on a single food product, FARM will address a shared challenge across the sector: many animal cells are poorly suited to industrial manufacturing because they grow slowly, have limited proliferative capacity, require complex culture conditions and can lose important functional characteristics during prolonged expansion.

FARM will establish a cell-engineering framework to create high-performing food-production cell lines. The project will progress through three key stages:

- Adaptation: establish animal cell populations capable of sustained growth in food-compatible, serum-free culture conditions and scalable culture formats.
- Reprogramming: modify cellular traits associated with replicative lifespan, growth, survival and maintenance of food-relevant phenotypes.
- Manufacturing: evaluate engineered cell lines under scalable culture conditions and determine how cell engineering influences growth, cell yield, metabolic performance and product-relevant function.

The project will use cell types relevant to both meat and dairy applications, enabling common engineering principles to be identified across cellular agriculture rather than developing a process around a single end product.

By engineering the cell alongside the manufacturing process, FARM aims to reduce a major barrier to economically viable cellular agriculture: the limited manufacturability of current animal cell lines. The project could generate intellectual property around engineered cell lines and manufacturing strategies while supporting translation into the emerging cellular-agriculture industry. Ultimately, FARM will help establish the scientific and engineering foundations required for scalable, lower-carbon production of animal-derived foods and strengthen UK capability in sustainable biomanufacturing.