It’s a good bet that Waterhouse will pick a winning wine. He’s widely respected for his expansive knowledge of wine chemistry and has educated a generation of winemakers during his 26 years teaching in UC Davis’s world-renowned program.

But Waterhouse hasn’t always been a wine connoisseur. With training in natural product synthesis, he started his career at a different school teaching organic chemistry primarily to premed students and researching conformational analysis of polysaccharides. One day, while paging through C&EN on a flight, Waterhouse saw a job posting for an assistant professor of viticulture and enology at UC Davis. He wanted to return to the West Coast, where he went to school, so he applied.