An engineer's route into food science, and back into the lecture theatre.

My academic path has moved deliberately between engineering and food science. I completed an engineering degree at Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) in Surabaya, then spent two years inside a food manufacturing operation before returning to postgraduate study at The University of Queensland, where I completed a Master's degree in Food Science and Technology with Distinction.

Studying in Australia on a scholarship from Lembaga Pengelola Dana Pendidikan (LPDP) carried an expectation that the work would be put to public use, and that expectation still frames how I choose what to study. Alongside coursework I was selected for the UQ Summer Research Program — a competitive scheme that admitted 385 of 930 applicants — and was recognised with the UQ Employability Award, endorsed by the Vice-Chancellor and Academic Registrar.

Before postgraduate study I worked for two years in a food company producing palm-oil based products: cooking oil, margarine, cocoa butter substitutes and shortening. I held responsibility first as a production foreman and then as a process engineer, which meant living with the gap between how a process is specified and how it behaves at three in the morning on a running line.

That period gave me a working knowledge of unit operations, fluid handling and pump systems, and of the quality and safety constraints that govern edible-oil processing. It is the reason I treat process troubleshooting, specification and standards as teachable subjects rather than background detail.

I am drawn to research questions that begin as production or policy problems: why a fat crystallises the way it does, how a safety standard translates into a control point, what a trade rule means for a small producer. Research of that kind has to be rigorous to be useful, and useful to be worth doing.

The UQ Summer Research Program taught me the part of research that is rarely on a syllabus. Experiments did not go to plan and results were not what I expected, and the useful lesson was that setbacks are information rather than obstacles — a habit of mind I now try to build in students as much as in my own work.

I teach food engineering the way it is actually encountered: a principle, then the place that principle fails in practice, then what an engineer does about it. When I was invited back to ITS as a guest lecturer for Satuan Operasi Teknik Pangan, I structured the session around fluids and pumps in food production and deliberately spent as much time on the practical problems of the production line as on the theory that describes them.

Students engage when the stakes of a calculation are visible. My aim is for a graduate to leave a course able to reason from first principles, read a standard, and ask a sensible question about a process they have never seen before.

My immediate aim is to establish a teaching and research contribution in food science and technology within a university department: to teach unit operations and food processing well, to build a research line around food quality and food-safety governance, and to supervise students who want to work on real industrial and regulatory problems.

Over the longer term I want that work to connect Australian and Indonesian food systems — two contexts I have studied and worked in — around questions of food security, standards and sustainable production.