Dr Maria Charalambides is part of an exciting blue-sky research project involving collaborations between academia and the food industry.

The project titled “Developing multiscale models of digestion to enable targeted product solutions for nutrition and metabolic health” aims to stimulate technological advances that can deliver healthy nutrition for consumers.

At Imperial College London, the project is led by Professor Gary Frost (Faculty of Medicine), with co-investigators Dr Maria Charalambides (Department of Mechanical Engineering) and the Universities of  Oxford, Birmingham, Leeds and the Institute of Food Research. The research is supported by BBSRC, MRC, EPSRC and ESRC, with Nestlé, PepsiCo, Mondelez and pladis as industrial partners. 

There is currently little understanding of the relationship between early food digestion and the metabolic processes that affect appetite and blood sugar regulation. The development of multi-scale models of digestion, incorporating engineering and theoretical physics methodologies, will enable targeted product solutions for nutrition and metabolic health.