How a passion for baking fermented a fresh career move

Baking bread during Covid-19 lockdowns provided Chantle Edillor with some career inspiration. “I knew I wanted to do something different and an exploration in sourdough presented an opportunity that I felt uniquely able to pursue,” she says. In 2022, after completing PhD research into metabolic diseases at the University of California Los Angeles, Edillor began a postdoc there, where she researched the anti-inflammatory properties of fermented foods. She now works as a fermented food scientist at Microcosm Foods, a non-profit research organization that maps connections between fermented foods, microbes and human health, a role she combines with assay development at the Astera Institute, a similar non-profit based in the Bay Area, San Francisco. In the third episode of a six-part podcast series about creativity in science, Edillor says fermentation techniques re-ignited a childhood interest in cooking: “I have early memories of sitting and watching the Food Network with a metal bowl full of egg whites in my lap, holding a whisk and attempting to make stiff peak meringue, but also to understand how proteins capture air to create volume and texture.” Edillor’s culinary and scientific creativity extends to adding kombucha to leftover dinner party wine to make red wine vinegar, and making miso from blue tortillla chips. “Because the chips had been deep fried and fat does not necessarily ferment super well, it had this off flavour, kind of oxidized fat. I​​​​​​​’ll not be commercializing that anytime soon.” Summing up her career to date, she says: “I​​​​​​​’m a human geneticist masquerading as a yeast geneticist, masquerading as a microbiologist. There are certain areas of science that are less competitive and more collaborative. Those are the spaces I like to occupy.”