Farrel is a doctoral candidate in Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland. His doctoral research investigates how food structure influences postprandial energy expenditure and substrate utilisation. He is pursuing his doctoral studies with the support of a scholarship fully funded by the Riddet Institute.

He moved from Indonesia to Germany in 2016 to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Nutrition Science, which he completed in 2021, followed by a Master’s degree at the University of Potsdam in 2026. His master’s research focused on mitochondrial biology, investigating mitochondrial P5CS as a dynamic readout of oxygen sensing in humans. Alongside his master’s studies, he worked as a research assistant at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine.

Farrel has gained research experience through internships at the Human Nutrition Unit at the University of Auckland (2023) and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (2024), as well as an Erasmus+ supported research internship at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden (2024). He also received a fellowship to attend a two-week Next-Generation Sequencing summer school at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic (2023) as part of the EDUC (European Digital UniverCity) initiative and involved in a research project at Freie Universität Berlin, which was later presented at the Berlin Conference for Student Research 2024.