Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry, University of Nottingham
John is Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry at the University of Nottingham (UoN) and currently the Honorary Science Officer and Trustee of The Nutrition Society. He completed his undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the University of York in 1986, followed by MSc in Analytical Chemistry at Loughborough in 1987 and PhD in Reproductive Biochemistry at Nottingham in 1991. As a postdoc and research fellow at UoN, he worked on a number of projects in the area of nutritional biochemistry, before becoming an academic in 2001, following a brief period (2000-2001) in the pharmaceutical industry (Knoll Pharmaceuticals).
His work on Alternative proteins and digestibility began in 2018 with the establishment of the Future Protein Platform within the Future Food Beacon at UoN, which has now evolved into the Nutritional Composition & Digestibility Lab (https://tinyurl.com/UoNNCDLab). Projects have evaluated a variety of alternative protein sources, including underutilised crops (Bambara Groundnut, Winged Bean and Foxtail millet), insects (yellow mealworms, black soldier fly larvae and house crickets), bacterial and fungal proteins, as well as cultured meat products and more recently microalgae. Much of the work utilises the INFOGEST in vitro digestion system, which is a model of the human digestive system, to evaluate how food combinations and interactions of protein with other molecules (e.g. fibre, phytate and phenolics) impact on protein digestibility and release of amino acids.
