Food- and Bio-Tech made in Singapore by Dr Melanie Weingarten
16 Mar 2026
01.00 PM - 02.00 PM
MSE Meeting Room 1 (N4.1-01-28)
Alumni, Current Students
NTU MSE Seminar Hosted by Professor Hu Xiao
Abstract
The Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation (www.a-star.edu.sg/sifbi, SIFBI, A*STAR) brings together end-to-end research capabilities encompassing biotechnology, nutrition, food process engineering and cutting-edge analytics under one roof.
The “Alternative Protein Development Platform”, a Singapore Food Story grant project, will be introduced that demonstrates the development of novel food ingredients like proteins or lipids from alternative protein sources (plants, fungi, algae, yeast, etc.) with tailored functionalities for a wide range of food applications (i.e. meat analogues and dairy).
One of the main outcomes is a fully operational pilot-scale development platform (TRL 3-6). Since 2024, we are operating our lab-to-pilot Fermentation Joint Lab which is a collaboration between SIFBI and ScaleUpBio (https://www.scaleupbio.com/). Here, we have fermentation and downstream processing capacities supporting up to 200 L scale serving various ecosystem partners and customers from around the world like startup companies, SMEs, MNCs, and Singapore institutes of higher learnings and universities to translate and bring their technology closer to market. Examples for our inhouse biomass and precision fermentation developments will be demonstrated.
Biography
Dr. Melanie Weingarten
A*STAR, Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation
Dr. Melanie Weingarten is Co-Head of the Biotransformation & Engineering Division at the Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation and Co-Lead of the Joint Fermentation Lab together with our partner ScaleUpBio.
Before she worked at BASF SE in “White Biotechnology Research” and “Process Research & Chemical Engineering”. She was responsible for process development for projects in nutrition and health chemistry, aroma chemicals, crop protection, pharma, cosmetics and biopolymers. She studied chemistry and physics as a fellow of the German National Merit Foundation at RWTH Aachen and UC Berkeley. She graduated at the Max-Planck-Institute for Coal Research with Prof. A. Fürstner in metalorganic chemistry and natural product synthesis followed by a Postdoc at MIT with Prof. B. Imperiali in biochemistry and microbiology.
She is Adj. Assoc. Professor at National Technical University of Singapore (NTU, CCEB) and Adj. Assoc. Professor at National University of Singapore (NUS, SynCTI).