Kaydren Orcutt is a research chemist at the Agricultural Resource Service (United States Department of Agriculture) at the Western Regional Research Center in Albany, CA. Her current research focuses on sustainability and safety in agriculture and industry. Projects include developing polymer formulations using shellfish waste in collaboration with Tidal Vision and testing new antimicrobials with iPura Food Safety.

She obtained her PhD from UC Berkeley where she studied the fundamentals of light harvesting and energy transfer in the Physical Chemistry program with Professor Graham Fleming. For more info see Research.

She was a Berkeley SciComm Fellow and gave public speaking and science storytelling workshops on UC Berkeley’s campus starting in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022. Kaydren served as Director of Informal Science Communication for the NSF-funded Center for Synthesizing Quantum Coherence (CSQC) from 2021 to 2022. She has worked to combine her love of art and science to create digital comics and animations to accompany her science communication articles, to present complicated data in a new and engaging way. For latest work see SciComm.