Dr. Putu Virgina Partha Devanthi earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Birmingham, the United Kingdom, in 2018. She received her master’s degree in Biotechnology (2013) and bachelor’s degree in Microbiology (2012) cum laude from Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Indonesia, through an accelerated program funded by the Indonesian Ministry of Education Directorate General of Higher Education (DIKTI). She became an assistant professor at i3L in 2018 and was assigned as Head of the Biotechnology Department in 2021. Since 2021, she has also been appointed as an adjunct lecturer at the UCSI University, Malaysia.

Dr. Putu’s research interests revolve around food safety, fermentation, probiotics, and microbial encapsulation. Her research on microbial interaction and encapsulation and its applications in improving the flavor and aroma of reduced-salt soy sauce has been published in highly ranked international journals, including Food Chemistry (impact factor 7.514) and Food Research International (impact factor 6.475). Her findings have also been disseminated in many international conferences held by the Society for Applied Microbiology (SfAM) in Dublin, Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Brighton and the European Federation of Food Science and Technology in Sitges, Spain. In addition, she was awarded a research grant from the Indonesian Toray Science Foundation on a project titled “Survival of potential foodborne pathogens (Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Staphylococcus aureus) in reduced-salt soy sauce fermentation”. This work was presented in the FEMS Online Conference on Microbiology, organized by the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS) and the Serbian Society of Microbiology in 2020. Then, in collaboration with the University of the Aegean, Greece, she conducted a cross-cultural sensory analysis on Indonesian soy sauce products combined with facial expression analysis using FaceReader.

Dr. Putu’s research group is particularly interested in bacterial cellulose production and development for applications in the food and pharmaceutical industries. This three-year project is a collaboration with the University of Boras, Sweden. It is funded by the Ministry of Research and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia through the World Class Research scheme. Her finding was published in 2021 in one of the top international journals, the Journal of Fungi (impact factor 5.816). Dr. Putu’s research group is also exploring potential probiotics of local origin, focusing on functionality characterization and formulation.