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You are here: AU PhD  Graduate Schools Science and Technology Programmes/Departments Food Science



Vision and objective of the PhD education at the Department of Food Science

The Department of Food Science aims to provide a PhD degree in Food Science at the highest international level. This requires dedicated PhD students and supervisors as well as a fine working environment. The Department of Food Science considers the PhD programme to be an important part of the research programme and supports and encourages the facilitation of an inspiring environment for the PhD students.

The Food Science PhD Programme

The department carries out research in the whole food production chain to enable management of food quality characteristics of significance for consumer perception, nutritional and health quality of the raw material and the suitability for further processing. The research provides new knowledge concerning the sustainable production and quality of fruits, vegetables, ornamentals, dairy, meat and egg products and forms the basis for dissemination of knowledge at the highest level within the area.

Major research areas related to fruit, vegetable and ornamental research:

Major research areas related to dairy, meat and egg research:

Research in Food Science often takes place in close cooperation with leading food, crop and biotechnology companies beside internationally acknowledged universities and research centres. This set-up provides good opportunities for students to cooperate both with industry and/or the international research community.

Food research facilities

The department has modern research and experimental facilities and equipment for a wide range of physiological and technical experiments: Field and stable facilities, state-of-art greenhouses, controlled environments, storage rooms and in vitro laboratories.

The analytical equipment includes: HPLC, GC-MS, Q-TOF, iontrap, Maldi TOF/TOF, high- and low field NMR, ESR, Chromatography equipment, DSC, FTIR and facilities for sensory science and state-of-art equipped photosynthesis and root laboratories.

The department is organized in five science teams

Links to the department website:

PhD students are assigned to the team where the project most naturally has it’s home. Said that, several of our PhD projects will involve people from different teams, and often involve collaboration between different teams and exchange of different competences. A focus of the scientific environment at Food Science is knowledge sharing and dissemination of knowledge.

Working environment

Currently 27 PhD students are working at the Department of Food Science. They have very different backgrounds both scientifically and culturally. Besides the ordinary supervisor a laboratory technician, another scientist from the department or a postdoc or PhD student might be assigned to the PhD student.


A focus area is to incorporate a change of environment, preferably a stay abroad, during the PhD study period, and furthermore, the PhD student is expected minimum once to present results from his/hers PhD project at an international conference.

National and international cooperation

The science teams at Department of Food Science have many different national and international cooperation partners.

Employment after graduation

Examples include: Department of Food Science (AU), Eurofins, Aarhus Hospital, Hamlet Protein, Arla Foods, iNANO (AU), Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics (AU), Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology (SDU).

Revised 16.05.2017

Head of programme Marianne Hammershøj

Associate professor
M email@example.com bldg. F20/8845, 3370
P +4587157974 
The information on this page is information specifically for PhD students at the Food Programme.

PhD studies at Aarhus University About Department of Food Science