Broderick House - 2020 cohort

  Broderick House bjh63@cam.ac.uk

  USA

  Zoology, Wolfson College

PhD thesis: Urban bivalves: exploring new seafood aquaculture opportunities for food security.

Research interests:

  1. Food Security

  2. Public Health

  3. Bivalves

  4. Aquaculture

With a current human population of 7.6 billion, and an expected growth to 9.8 billion by 2050, demands for resource availability are also increasing. Bivalves (clams, oysters, mussels, etc.) being high in protein, fortifiable with micronutrients, and able to produce high value by-products, are a promising sustainable option for delivering food and economic security. However, due to their filter feeding behaviour, bivalves also risk accumulating pathogenic and toxic materials. My research will leverage emerging technologies in bivalve aquaculture production from the Aquatic Ecology Group, here at Cambridge, to develop closed systems allowing urban settings, including currently untapped land-locked areas, to produce safe, fast-growing, sustainable bivalve products.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

Inspiration for my research began whilst working in the Dominican Republic where I witnessed first-hand the lack of food and nutritional security in low resource communities, and its larger consequential effects. This was later found to be similar in high resource countries demonstrating the severe lack of accessible and nutritional food globally. My entrepreneurial, and biomedical engineering background further inspired me to utilize my experiences to combine basic and translational research to address some of the hardest questions currently facing food and nutritional security, especially in a sustainable manner in a time of a climate crisis and increasing human population.