I started my academic life at NC State as a food and flavor chemist thinking that sensory science experience would round out my skill set–after all, how useful is it to accurately quantify flavor compounds if you don’t have an equally good grasp of what they taste like in the end? What I’d originally planned as a Master’s degree in sensory science at Virginia Tech morphed into a PhD project in the automated analysis of flavor descriptions.
A chronic dabbler in Linguistics, Math, Language, Chemistry, Computer Science, and many other fields, I’m now an early-career Sensory Scientist working at the nexus of those disciplines. I want to understand how different kinds of people think and talk about sensory experiences in their daily lives, and to take the language and priorities of everyday eaters seriously. I’m eager to pursue these frontiers and share knowledge in my next year in Dr. Julien Delarue’s lab at UC Davis, and beyond. My path is set towards an academic career, but I will continue to move forward wherever I see good opportunities to help other sensory and food scientists do their work better, faster, and with a more interdisciplinary perspective.
If you ferment anything at home or anyone has ever called your food descriptions “evocative”, we should talk.