Amy Rowat, a professor in UCLA’s department of integrative biology & physiology, has been named the recipient of the 2025 Gold Shield Faculty Prize. The award, sponsored by Gold Shield, Alumnae of UCLA, recognizes mid-career faculty for outstanding achievements in teaching, research and service. It includes an unrestricted $30,000 prize.
Rowat’s career has included developing innovative courses that use food to teach scientific concepts. While at Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow in 2010, she helped organize a “science & cooking” class after famed chef Ferran Adrià visited campus. “We were shocked when almost 1,000 people showed up to see Chef Adrià’s lecture,” Rowat said. “Chef Adrià was excited to develop a collaboration with Harvard, so my colleagues and I put together the first ‘science & cooking’ class, which introduced concepts in soft matter physics to undergraduates. Each week, we presented a different scientific concept — think foams and emulsions — and a top chef flew in to do a demo.”
After joining UCLA in 2011, Rowat launched her own course called “science & food.” The class presents weekly scientific topics tied to real-life examples from cooking. Before the pandemic, it included an apple pie bake-off where students applied classroom knowledge to baking.
Rowat’s research focuses on cancer and cellular agriculture. Her lab is developing mechanotyping technologies that identify compounds making cancer cells stiffer and less able to invade tissue. This work aims to find new ways to block metastasis and improve cancer treatments while reducing toxicity for patients.
Her group also applies similar principles to engineer tissues for sustainable food production—a field known as cellular agriculture—which seeks alternatives to conventional meat production.
Students have praised Rowat’s teaching style for connecting theoretical knowledge with practical applications. One undergraduate said: “The materials required help us to know the material more in-depth, and we are provided with the direct correlations between what we learn on paper and what we see in the world… Professor Rowat does a wonderful job of bridging the gap between numbers and meaning, science and life.”
Rachelle Crosbie, chair of integrative biology & physiology at UCLA, noted Rowat’s qualifications for the award: “Professor Rowat’s research program in mechanobiology continues to be funded by competitive national and international awards and grants,” Crosbie said. “Her accomplishments to create and develop innovative curricula, including the ‘science & food’ public lecture programs and K-12 curricular resources, are borne out of her dedication to increase accessibility of science careers to all.”
Rowat holds several leadership roles at UCLA including founder/director of Science & Food; Marcie H. Rothman Presidential Chair in Food Studies; Allen Distinguished Investigator; vice chair of graduate education; faculty chair of the food studies minor; and director of the Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies.
Reflecting on her academic path from Guelph, Ontario through physics into biophysics research linking cell shape with function, Rowat explained: “I shifted my focus to physics but through my training I always sought out projects that applied physics to biology… This link between cell shape, form and function is a theme that still fascinates me and inspires our lab’s research.”
Michellene DeBonis, chair of the Gold Shield Faculty Prize Committee said: “What set professor Rowat apart was the rare combination of creativity, academic rigor and meaningful impact across teaching, research and service… She has a gift for making complex science approachable — using food as a lens to explore biophysics in ways that are both intellectually rich and deeply engaging for students.”
Rowat plans to use her $30,000 prize money toward furthering her lab’s work on cancer cell mechanobiology: “Using a new platform we developed based on tumor cell deformability, we recently discovered new targets to block cancer spread. The Gold Shield award will allow us to advance mechanotherapeutics with the ultimate goal of better controlling cancer,” she said.
