Posted on September 15th, 2022 in In the News, Researcher Profiles
![](https://ag.purdue.edu/food-safety-innovation-lab/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/20220901-800x533.jpg)
Every class taught by Andrea Bersamin, professor in the Department of Biology and Wildlife at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, begins with a rundown of her favorite childhood reading materials.
At a young age, she begged her mother for a subscription to Bon Appétit, a monthly cooking and culinary arts magazine, and had a unique fascination with the world’s best-selling medical textbook, the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. She and her sister reveled in a series of detective books, which instructed the reader on how to become a skilled sleuth.