Directory

Biography

Dr. Livia Vastag has been a professor at Castleton since 2011. Her passions are teaching and cooking. She enjoys integrating these two in her Science of Food course offered as a science course in the general education program. She also teaches Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Virology.

Dr. Vastag completed her undergraduate education at Middlebury College. Her undergraduate research was in the area of bioinorganic chemistry, focusing on platinum-based chemotherapy agents. As a significant shift in her focus of study, her masters and Ph.D. work was completed at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. She worked in the pioneering field of viral metabolomics, studying the impact viruses have on their host cells with a team of scientists from a variety of different fields.

In her free time, Dr. Vastag likes to travel, cycle, test new recipes, watch movies, and write her blog "The Planet of Crepes".

Education

Ph.D., Princeton University
M.A., Princeton University
B.A., Middlebury College 

Accomplishments

• Lived in Hungary and Norway
• Graduated from Red Cross Nordic United World College
• Received Phi Beta Kappa award of the 2007 Middlebury College graduating class
• Maintains a blog on cooking with over 700 illustrated recipes