Career paths insights at Young EFFoST Day 2021

September 01, 2021

During this fourth edition of Young EFFoST Day, we will be joined by food professionals who will share insights into their job reality and career path. To warm up your taste buds, speakers Célie Rullière and Alexandra Blanchard share advice and key learnings for people just entering the job market.

Célie Rullière
Science & Technology Strategy and Innovation Partnership Lead at Nestlé Research

What advice would like to give to young researchers based on your own experience?
Embrace uncertainty and opportunities in your career path while being clear on your values, on what is important and not important for you. From my perspective, this is a great way to continue learning and discovering new things all along your career while keeping it moving in the right direction for you.

What key learning have you acquired from your current position?
Always put yourself in the shoes of others and look at different perspectives. This has always been useful for me to build proposals that resonate with my stakeholders and clients.

What aspects do you like most in your current job?
Translating science into tangible opportunities is something I really like, and that I have the pleasure to do every day, with both internal and external stakeholders. Listening to people and connecting the dots to create richer ideas is an important aspect of it, that I highly appreciate. And the most exciting part of all of this is when you see the outcome of your work becoming part of the everyday life of consumers-making a difference by creating a moment of pleasure, by proposing healthier choices but also by creating more sustainable ways to make food.

Alexandra Blanchard
Dr. Alexandra Blanchard is Research and Innovation Director for the feed additives segment at ADM. 

What advice would like to give to young researchers based on your own experience?
Coming from academia, be a scientist in the industry was not really well perceived. My advice would be: try it and see if it fits your expectations. You can perform really high quality research in the industry, the cherry on the cake being that your research outputs will turn into something realistic in the end.

What key learnings have you acquired from your current position?
Transformation of scientific knowledge into something that is useful for the industry to shape the world of tomorrow is really exciting but also a great achievement for a scientist

What aspects do you like most in your current job?
Everything! Leading a research team with a high scientific level, a huge diversity of expertise and a deep commitment to supporting building the future of the division is fantastic. The internal network is also incredible in ADM, so the opportunity to innovate is amazing. I like to think big and leverage internal capabilities and external partnerships to develop new products, answering customers’ unmet needs. As a research director, I like to use and share my experience from academia to continuously improve our research capacity and knowledge.  

The Young EFFoST will be held the morning before the official start of the 35th EFFoST International Conference. It will take place at the SwissTech Convention Center in Lausanne, Switzerland on Monday 1 November 2021. The day consists of interactive activities including inspiring talks and networking. Find the full programme here and register here.

Cookie settings