Joshua Evans is founder and leader of the Novel Fermentations Research Group and senior researcher at the Danish Technical University’s Center for Biosustainability in Copenhagen. For his PhD research, carried out at Noma, Empirical, and Amass, he investigated how chefs’ pursuit of novel flavours through fermentation shapes microbial ecology and evolution. This project was built on his time at Nordic Food Lab, a non-profit institute for open-source exploration of flavour and food diversity, where he conducted and led research on neglected and underutilised foods like wild plants, insects, and fermentations. He’s received a Bachelor’s in the humanities at Yale, a Master’s in history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, and will soon defend his PhD in geography and the environment at Oxford. Like many of us, he hopes to make the world a bit better through food and flavour.