Calculating For The Future

Can Breweries Provide More STEM Jobs for Women?

- Bryan Roth

Karen Fortmann has killed a lot of mice. 

During her graduate work at the University of California-San Diego, Fortmann studied cell signaling, which, put simply, centered on how messages are relayed between cells. Using mice as test subjects helped her better understand the process, which could be put to practical use to treat autoimmune diseases and cancer.

En route to her Ph.D. during five years in UC-San Diego’s graduate program in chemistry, she lost count of how many mice she ended up studying. It was important research that landed her job offers from local biotech companies to continue her work, though. For a while, she even considered becoming a professor.

“But in all honesty, I was sick of killing mice,” Fortmann says.

Luckily for her, one of the faculty participating on her dissertation committee held the same role for Chris White, who almost 20 years prior had taken his own Ph.D. in biochemistry and started White Labs, a leading yeast producer for the beer industry. Fortmann was asked to share her resume—maybe they were hiring.

In July 2014, passing up offers to continue her work around cellular communication, she started postdoctoral research at White Labs in San Diego, where she’s since become senior research scientist. She now puts her Ph.D. to work researching yeast genomes to better understand the microorganism and how to propagate, store, and use yeast for brewing.

“Traditional scientists may laugh at brewing scientists because we’re not doing the same kind of work,” Fortmann says. “But there are a lot of open fields, a lot of questions to be answered and there’s a lot to be done.”