Chemistry and Biochemistry

Ashley in Paris: Alumna is the youngest perfumer at leading fragrance creation house

For San Francisco State University alumna Ashley Santiago (B.S., ’16), scent is memory: tied to a family member’s favorite perfume, a moment in high school or her freshman year of college. And it’s not just a reflection of the past. For Santiago, scent is also her future.

Santiago is the youngest perfumer at Givaudan, the world’s largest manufacturer of flavors, fragrances and active cosmetic ingredients. She is the only American perfumer at Givaudan’s Fine Fragrance Creative Centre in Paris, where fragrances are developed for major fashion houses and beauty brands such as YSL, Prada, Marc Jacobs and Maison Margiela.

Her path to that role — and to Paris, where she lives today — began early. Since she was a teenager in the Bay Area, she’s been obsessed with fragrances. She read blogs about perfume, researched ingredients and even asked her parents to drive her to department stores so she could smell the fragrances there.

“In high school, you start thinking, ‘What are you going to do?’ I Googled, ‘Where do fragrances come from?’” Santiago said. “I didn’t even realize there was a person making them. I just thought it was a factory or something.”

She soon learned that becoming a perfumer requires extensive training and a Chemistry degree. That realization pointed her toward Chemistry — and ultimately to SFSU.

Read the full SFSU News story.

Elmer Guzman didn’t always see himself as a researcher. A first-generation Chemistry senior at San Francisco State University, he wasn’t sure he belonged in a lab until this summer, when he became one of the first Gilead Innovation Initiative Scholars.

“It makes me feel proud of myself,” Guzman said. “Just seeing the recognition and knowing that there are opportunities trying to help students who are new to research makes me feel like there is a future to these things.”

Guzman is one of 30 student scientists who made up the first cohort of the Gilead Innovation Initiative at SFSU. The Gilead Foundation generously gifted $1.25 million in programmatic support to SFSU’s College of Science & Engineering (CoSE) via two awards during fundraising for the University’s new Science and Engineering Innovation Center (SEIC). In addition to supporting student research activities, the foundation also provided $3.75 million to outfit SEIC labs with state-of-the-art equipment and furnishings.

The Gilead Innovation Scholars — 11 undergraduate and 19 graduate students — were awarded $5,000 stipends to conduct research between June 1 and August 23. (Faculty members were also awarded a $1,000 honorarium for mentoring the scholars). Many of the student awardees were first-time researchers as well as students who had never received financial support for working in research labs. 

The Gilead award is unique in that it is inclusive of research activities throughout CoSE. It included at least one student from each of the eight CoSE departments and schools, supporting the training of astronomers, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, geologists, mathematicians, physicists, psychologists and others. Projects ranged from molecular biology and ecology to nanoparticles, artificial intelligence, youth psychology and many other topics in science and engineering. 

Read the full story at SF State News