The smell of coffee connects me with snapshots of my life, and I reminisce of my grandmother making sweet and concentrated 'cafecito' in her old coffee pot. As I serve a cup of coffee, I remember my aunt and my grandmother visiting my mom before sunrise to share a cup of coffee, a family tradition. And I also remember the old and musty photo album my mom showed me with pictures of my grandfather. In the album, there are black and white photos of my grandfather when he was young, standing next to coffee plantations in El Salvador, before my grandparents emigrated to Panama. There are also technicolor pictures of my late grandfather, his head covered in white hairs, drying coffee cherries under the sun. I used this photo as a reference to make my favorite oil painting, which now decorates my parents' living room, and my mom uses it as a talking point to share why coffee is our family heritage. Lastly, the album also shows my grandmother and my grandfather laughing next to the old coffee pot, a testament that the old metallic pot is a family relic. When we moved away, the coffee pot stayed in my family home, and my sister and I bought our own french press. My sister has become more sophisticated with her coffee. She cares about the bean's quality, researches roast levels, fine grind vs. coarse grind, and how cold brewing brings out more floral flavors in the coffee. I have become a more sophisticated coffee drinker thanks to her. But regardless of the quality of the coffee, there is something warm and familiar about it. For me, coffee is a small, simple pleasure that ties my family and heritage into a single cup of happiness. For me, love smells like coffee.

One of my favorite memories from my childhood was helping my parents grow their vegetable garden. I was born in Panama, and my grandparents were immigrants from the coffee-growing regions in El Salvador. Thus, my family knew how to work the land. In the last days of the rainy season, my mom would wake my sister and me around 6 am and she would serve us our 'heavy' breakfast consisting of beans, tortillas, and avocados. That meant we had a day full of physical work ahead of us. But instead of hating it, my sister and I loved working in the garden. My parents did the heavy work: my dad plowed the soil and aerated it, my mom got rid of small stones, did weed removal, and planned where everything would go. My sister and I were in charge of filling the trays for the vegetable nursery. Seedlings grew into plants, and flowers blossomed and transformed into plump vegetables. Witnessing nature was magical. My grandparents had planted avocado trees, oranges, caimitos, guavas, and other tropical trees. So, by the time I was a kid, there was a bountiful season every year. Growing vegetables was so precious to my sister and me that we got into trouble for it. My parents had their vegetable garden in our backyard. We didn't have the exact security clearance in my grandmother's house, yet we found a plot of land in her front yard, concealed by tall bushes. That summer, we always found excuses to visit grandma. We repeated the steps that we saw our parents do; we stole dry corn from my grandmother's pantry and planted them. We would water the seeds with plastic jugs bigger than our heads, and the plants were already our height. One day, my mom sat us down in the living room. "Your grandma found out what you were doing with her front yard. She had one of your cousins remove all the maize," she said. We cried. My mom explained that she was proud of us, but she was emphatic that planting maize in the front yard wasn't a good idea. It could attract rodents, and the neighbors could complain. As I grew up and moved around the world, I realized that growing plants and gardening is a way to make myself feel connected to my family and heritage. In college, I joined Blue Jay's Perch, a community vegetable garden. Some of my friends and I stayed during summer to take care of arugulas and tomatoes. One of my proudest possessions in college was my mini vegetable garden: I had mint, basil, rosemary, tomatoes, peppers, chilies, potatoes, and sweet potatoes in planters in my apartment. I have kept that roster of plants every since. However, the first time I grew potatoes, I wasn't careful to plan the locations of my plants. My mom used to plan that for me. I planted my potatoes next to my tomatoes, and soon, they started competing for nutrients and got blight. It was a disheartening sight because I was extremely proud of my tomatoes. At first, I didn't know why my tomatoes looked unhealthy until I realized that only the tomatoes next to the potatoes were suffering. That experience taught me the importance of choosing companion plants wisely. During the pandemic, I managed to visit my grandparent's house and witnessed coffee plants flowering and transforming into coffee cherries for the first time. I had always been away while that happened, so I decided to pick some and plant them in their backyard. It felt like life was beginning a new cycle.

When I envision the future, I imagine algae ponds and bioreactors outside large cities, providing sustenance for the population. Naturally produced coffee, chocolate, and specific cuts of meats will be considered luxuries. Most of the people will consume milk produced without the cows and eggs produced without the chickens. Food items will be made in reactor tanks using yeast cells or animal or plant cells produced at a large scale. The production plants will look and work like breweries: large stainless steel tanks containing medium (in the case of beer, wort) will host a microorganism or cells (in the case of beer, yeast), and these cells will consume the medium to produce the desired output, through the process of fermentation. These new products will all be possible thanks to Cellular Agriculture. This interdisciplinary and emerging field applies biotechnology, biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, molecular biology, synthetic biology, and tissue engineering techniques. In the long run, cellular agriculture holds the promise of increasing our capabilities of feeding the world while having a lower environmental impact. Global food security is one of the biggest problems of humankind. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050, the demand for food will increase by 60% due to population growth. And unfortunately, the food supply will decrease due to the decline in the availability of arable land. Global warming poses a huge threat to food staples: avocados, coffee, chocolate, soybeans, strawberries, bananas, among many other products, will cease to exist. How can children grow up without chocolate? How will we explain to people the taste of coffee if they never get to try it? The solutions to these problems must simultaneously try to dampen the effects of climate change and diversify the safe food production methods. Chemical engineers can alleviate these problems. For decades, chemical engineers have refined the mathematical methods to design, control, and improve bioreactors and devised processes to isolate useful products from them. Thus, chemical engineers have paved the way to deploy algae carbon bio-sequestration and cellular agriculture at a large scale. Cellular agriculture is a revolutionary technology to produce animal-based products without requiring animals. It is thus a more humane option to source certain materials and products, as these can be produced in controlled bioreactors: animal proteins, animal tissue, and animal fats, and plant tissues and metabolites can be grown in reactor tanks. Chemical engineers have already developed the bioprocessing methods needed by these future industries. I dream of a world where we could recycle the food that we waste as a society, create mediums with this, and upcycle them as inputs to produce the food. I dream of a world where we work together to make sure that every person is nourished and has access to food, a world where every child knows what chocolate tastes like, and people can start their mornings with coffee. Multiple STEM fields hold the answer to the Global Food Security challenge, and I am committed to being one of the engineers solving this problem.

For me, love smells like coffee. I grew up seeing my mom, aunt, and grandmother rise before the sun to share a cup of coffee. More importantly, coffee is my heritage. My grandparents used to work in coffee plantations, and coffee was the one thing they brought with them when they traveled from El Salvador to put down roots in the fertile lands of Panama. Some years ago, I embarked on a personal project of planting coffee shrubs in my backyard, and I reached out to an agricultural engineer for advice. He warned me that my efforts were futile because, by 2050, climate change will reduce coffee production by more than 30%. I was shocked. The more I researched, the more concerned I grew about the people of the future. How can children grow up without chocolate? How will we explain to people the taste of coffee if they never get to try it? This experience kick-started my passion for the future of food. I am very passionate about food security and food sustainability. Global food security is one of the biggest problems of humankind. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050, the demand for food will increase by 60% due to population growth. My life's mission is to apply chemical and biomedical engineering knowledge to solve this challenge. I firmly believe that fermentation in the form of precision fermentation, algae bioprocesses, and the cultivation of animal cells in bioreactors hold immense promise to tackle one of humanity's biggest challenges. Thus, I decided to deepen my chemical engineering knowledge by getting a Master's in Chemical Engineering and progressing to a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. I am currently working on getting funding for a thesis project that aims to lower the costs of Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids are not only sold as supplements; they are essential food additives for farmed fish and alternative and vegan seafood products. In the future, as global fish stocks decline, we need a sustainable source of these fatty acids to supply the world population. Fish provide a source of critical fatty acids in the human diet, especially the Omega-3 fatty acids EPA (Eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (Docosahexaenoic acid). The primary sources of DHA and EPA are fish species such as herring and salmon. However, global fish stocks are declining, and farmed fish need to be supplemented with Omega-3, mainly because fish consume them from other fish and microalgae in the food chain. Thus, fatty acids produced through microbial fermentation are of particular interest, as they could provide a sustainable source of nutrients. However, DHA and EPA from microbial fermentation sources currently represent less than 2% of the market. They are more expensive than fish oils due to low cell densities and titers of fatty acids. Currently, the most used microalgae for the production of EPA and DHA are C. cohnii and Schizochytrium, which produce 30-70% of dry biomass in total lipids. In order to promote lipid accumulation in excess, Carbon and limited Nitrogen (N) are used; however, this causes a reduction in cell growth, resulting in low DHA titers. If I had unlimited resources, I would design and engineer the metabolic pathway for EPA and DHA production in C. zofingiensis to create a sustainable and cost-effective new microalgal source of these omega-3 fatty acids. Chromochloris zofingiensis is a fast-growing microalga that can achieve high cell densities under different conditions. C. zofingiensis produces oils and can exhibit a total lipid content >50% of dry biomass and a triacylglycerol (TAG) content of 36% of dry biomass under nitrogen starvation. Additionally, C. zofingiensis produces the secondary keto-carotenoid Astaxanthin. Astaxanthin is a widely used chemical for nutraceutical, food, feed, and pharmaceutical purposes. Notably, Astaxanthin gives salmon its characteristic color, and it also gives lobsters, shrimp, and crab their red color when cooked. The FDA approves Astaxanthin as a fish feed and food dye for farm-raised salmon and chicken egg yolks. Astaxanthin can be produced synthetically; however, naturally derived Astaxanthin has higher antioxidant activity. If I had an unlimited budget, I would genetically engineer strains of C. zofingiensis to provide a new algae strain that can produce a high-value chemical like Asthaxanthin to offset the production costs of Omega-3 in algae. I would construct a synthetic pathway using genes of desaturases and enlongases from multiple species to use C18:1Δ9 and C16:0 as precursors for EPA and DHA production in C. zofingiensis. I would also grow C. zonfingiensis in bioreactors, measure the engineered strains' cell density, and measure their EPA, DHA, and Astaxanthin production. I would further carry out metabolic flux analysis to improve carbon flux in the cells and maximize product output. In this way, I would be using my knowledge and skills as a chemical engineer to provide solutions for a current pressing problem of the food industry. If I could request even more funds, I would invest them in diversifying and making public the techniques developed by the nascent field of cellular agriculture. This interdisciplinary and emerging field applies biotechnology, biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, molecular biology, synthetic biology, and tissue engineering techniques to produce animal products without animals. It is a more humane and more sustainable option to our current production methods of sourcing animal meats, fats, and proteins. In the long run, cellular agriculture holds the promise of increasing our capabilities of feeding the world while having a lower environmental impact. I dream of a world where we could recycle the food that we waste as a society, create mediums with this, and upcycle them as inputs to produce the food. I dream of a world where we work together to make sure that every person is nourished and has access to food, a world where every child knows what chocolate tastes like, and people can start their mornings with coffee. Multiple STEM fields hold the answer to the Global Food Security challenge, and I am committed to being one of the engineers solving this problem.