Growing up in Hong Kong, Kiki Chan (ChemE MASc 1T8, PhD 2T5) says that food was central to both culture and daily life.
“In my family, the way my elders showed love to me was to ask: have you eaten yet?” says Chan.
“It wasn’t until many years later that I realized just how big an impact my chosen field of chemical engineering has on our food systems.”
Chan is one of more than a thousand students graduating at U of T Engineering convocation on June 17.
Before coming to U of T, she completed her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the University of British Columbia and began her career working in Alberta’s oil and gas industry.
But after a few years, she found herself wanting an escape from the boom-and-bust nature of the oil business. That’s when her passion for food came roaring back.
“I literally Googled ‘chemical engineering food Canada,’” she says.
“My future supervisor’s page was the first thing to come up.”
Professor Levente Diosady (ChemE), along with Professor Yu-Ling Cheng (ChemE) agreed to supervise her master’s thesis, and eventually her PhD.
Together, they worked on new ways to fortify common foods with nutrients that are often lacking in the diets of people in the developing world.
“Many of the women in my family are anemic, and I knew it was a common condition in women all around the world,” says Chan.
Diosady and his collaborators have spent decades developing a technology known as a micronutrient premix.
Made of multi-layered particles that look and feel like grains of salt, the premix is engineered to deliver nutritionally important substances, such as iron, zinc, vitamin B12, and folic acid.
This micronutrient premix can be added to salt or to other commonly consumed food items as a safe and cost-effective way to help alleviate nutrient deficiencies that are common in many parts of the world.
For her thesis, Chan focused on how food manufacturing processing conditions might affect the stability of these particles.
“One of the key things we needed to establish was how these particles would stand up to vigorous mechanical mixing, or high temperatures, or other conditions that are commonly used in food preparation,” says Chan.
Towards the end of her PhD, Chan applied her findings to fortify bouillon cubes using micronutrient premix particles.
“My work not only tells us if it’s possible to add premix particles into bouillon cubes — which it is — but also which part of the process is best to add them into.”
Only a year into her master’s degree, Chan received an invite to present her work at the Bouillon Convening, a nutrition conference organized by the Gates Foundation and Helen Keller International, held in Dakar, Senegal.
“It was intimidating because there were all these well-established professionals from international development agencies, the private sector, and government health officials from many countries in West Africa, and then there was me: a graduate student, and the only person from academia,” she says.
“I was inspired by the passion for global health that everyone had, and they welcomed my input, even as a newbie to the field.”
Later, Chan travelled to India for ten days of field work as part of JCR1000: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Challenges, a course offered by U of T’s Centre for Global Engineering.
“I learned so much on that trip, and I wanted to see more,” she says “so as soon as I arrived back in Toronto, I started looking for opportunities to go back into the field.”
Chan ended up spending a few months in Coimbatore, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Her research focused on a particular plant called Moringa oleifera, sometimes known locally as the drumstick tree or horseradish tree.
“We know many parts of the plant are edible and nutritious, particularly the leaves, which are high in iron, vitamin C and other nutrients, but a key barrier for people to consume the leaves is their bitterness,” says Chan.
“We wanted to see if there was anything we could do to make it more palatable.”
After trying a variety of different chemical treatments, Chan and her collaborators found that the best solution was the simplest: adding sugar.
“It was really effective at balancing out the bitterness, but of course, high sugar intake is another thing we are concerned about, so there’s a balance to strike,” says Chan.
A little over halfway through her PhD, Chan gave birth to her first child. She says it very much drove home the importance of the work she was doing.
“In Toronto, it was very easy for me to get access to the right nutrients, such as folic acid and iron, which I knew that my baby and I would need,” she says.
“But I know that just isn’t the case for many mothers around the world. And then you think about that situation at the population level: a nutrient deficiency multiplied hundreds or thousands of times over, and the loss of potential that represents. It just doesn’t seem fair to me, and it makes me want to do what I can to change it.”
Chan already has a job lined up after graduation, working as a process engineer at Ativa Solutions, an Ontario-based engineering consulting firm for the food industry. She says she’s already applying the new skills she learned, and that she hasn’t ruled out a move back into the world of international development at some point in the future.
Chan says that one of the most important lessons she learned at U of T was resilience.
“I am fortunate to have a supportive family who cheered me on all these years, and on top of that, I’ve been privileged to train under Professors Yu-Ling Cheng and Levente Diosady, who taught me how to help solve global challenges as a scientist and engineer,”
“From them, I’ve learned that you don’t have to be a genius to do a PhD, but you do need determination and a growth mindset.
“I’ve learned how to identify the limits of my knowledge, how to be humble about that, and how to find the right mentors who can help me learn more.”
