My background has primarily been in food science but my growing curiosity in tech and drive for social impact led me to the Agricultural Informatics Lab. I completed my BSc in Food Science at the University of Minnesota, where I did both field and lab research work with maize and intermediate wheatgrass. After, I worked in R&D with arguably the tastiest food – cocoa and chocolate – at Cargill, MN. It was when I went home to Malaysia in 2019 and ventured outside my field at a digital therapeutics startup that sparked my curiosity in the tech space. In 2021, I returned to pursue an MSc in Food Science at Purdue University with the goal of building a career with social impact. I joined a lab conducting extension outreach and empowering communities with food safety education. But because I still missed all things data and tech, I decided to find an intersection of my backgrounds, to which Ankita Raturi’s research became the perfect blend! I am currently working on the Qualitative Research Study and Community Food Pathways in the Resilient Foods Project (can these be links?)