Advisory Board

Hanna L. Tuomisto, MSc

The AP article Scientists turn stem cells into pork said

Call it pork in a petri dish — a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, and save some pigs their bacon.
 
Hanna Tuomisto, who studies the environmental impact of food production at Oxford University said that switching to lab-produced meat could theoretically lower greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95 percent. Both land and water use would also drop by about 95 percent, she said.
 
“In theory, if all the meat was replaced by cultured meat, it would be huge for the environment,” she said. “One animal could produce many thousands of kilograms of meat.” In addition, lab meat can be nurtured with relatively few nutrients like amino acids, fats and natural sugars, whereas livestock must be fed huge amounts of traditional crops.

Hanna L. Tuomisto, MSc is D.Phil Candidate, University of Oxford.
 
Her research interests include environmental impacts of agriculture, sustainable farming systems, organic farming, life cycle assessment, carbon footprinting, and environmental economics.
 
Hanna coauthored Assessing the environmental impacts of contrasting farming systems and Comparison of energy and greenhouse gas balances of biogas with other transport biofuels options based on domestic agricultural biomass in Finland.
 
Hanna earned her MSc in Agroecology with a minor degree in Environmental Sciences at the University of Helsinki in 2007. She completed Erasmus exchange studies in MSc Applied Environmental Economics at Imperial College London from 2006 to 2007. Her PhD thesis is “Environmental impacts of contrasting farming systems”. In her PhD thesis she compares environmental impacts and profitability of organic, conventional, and integrated farming systems. She uses modeling for designing farming systems that can reduce negative environmental impacts while producing high yields.