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Nicholas Watson
University of Leeds, UK
Nik Watson is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in Food at the University of Leeds, where he co-founded the Food AI Lab (www.foodailab.co.uk). He is Deputy Co-Director and Industry Champion of the UK’s National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (www.napic.ac.ukopens in new tab/window) and Deputy Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Food Science and Nutrition.
An engineer by training, Nik is on a mission to turn AI from hype into real impact across the food system. For more than 15 years he has combined low-cost acoustic and optical sensors with machine learning to monitor, control and optimise food and drink manufacturing. Today he applies that toolkit to some of the sector’s biggest challenges: sustainable protein, the circular bioeconomy, food safety and resilience.
The Food AI Lab is built around five themes. It generates the data food AI needs, using large language models to extract knowledge from the literature, federated learning with industry, synthetic data and high-throughput experimentation. It develops physics-informed and hybrid models that fuse the lab’s wide range of sensors with domain knowledge. It links composition and structure to function to discover new proteins and lipids and to upcycle agri-food side streams. It optimises processes in the broadest sense, using Bayesian optimisation and active learning to accelerate how the lab itself works. And it embeds techno-economic and life cycle assessment from the outset, so that research is chosen and designed for real-world impact.
Nik holds an MEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Hull (2006) and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Leeds (2010). After four years as a postdoctoral researcher in the Food Physics Lab at Leeds, developing acoustic sensing technologies with industry partners, he joined the University of Nottingham as Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering in 2014 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020. He returned to Leeds in 2023 to take up his current chair.