Dr József Baranyi visited Imperial College to discuss the predictive food pathogenic models Sergey Goryunov and Vedish Bhatoolaul are developing. Sergey is looking at developing new methods in Population Level Modelling (PLM) and Vedish is working on an Individual Based Model (IBM).
I have visited Dr József Baranyi, leader of the Computational Microbiology Research Group at BBSRC’s Institute of Food Research to discuss possible collaboration on predictive microbiology. We have strong interests in developing reliable ways of constructing models for non-isothermal predictive microbiology. Currently population level modelling is based on first order kinetics for both growth and inactivation. This model however, is only applicable on a very limited and constant temperature range. Both professional and home cooking, on the other hand, take raw food ingredients through rather complicated heat cycles which in turn violate the validity conditions of the model. We have two fourth year undergraduate students, Sergey Goryunov and Vedish Bhatoolaul, working on this project.