Monday, 18 May 2026
The Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao senior polymer scientist works across the advanced biotech space and polymer and materials development fields – particularly focusing on composites and adhesives. She spends her days leading projects looking at how to make wood panels stronger, extract higher yields from fermentation or considering how enzymes could be designed to break down plastics more effectively, among other things.
“It’s a pretty broad field,” she says.
Angelique, known as Angel – describes her role as flexible and ideas-driven. She’s comfortable stepping into areas outside her expertise, as long as she has a strong team around her. The best part of the job, she says, is not being locked into one narrow specialty. “Collaborating across disciplines and working directly with industry to turn early-stage ideas into something that works in the real world is the cool part,” she says.
Currently she’s leading a collaboration with KiwiLeather Innovations to produce sustainable leather from surplus kiwifruit, and she’s supporting Tasman van der Woude and others in her team on the FermiTwin project – focused on creating an open-source control system to monitor fermentation as it happens. “Those streams of real-time data feed into a machine-learning “brain” that can be trained across different organisms and process types.”
The idea, Angel says, is to eventually expand this concept into a digital biofoundry where Kiwi-based biotech companies can use the Bioeconomy Science Institute’s digital twins and machine learning models to help optimise their processes faster – with the aim of helping them generate revenue.
“Once trained, the system can adjust a run in real time to improve fermentation outputs, rather than relying on slow trial-and-error over many batches.”
The hardware and software is built and the team is training the system now, running fermentations and building the datasets needed to make the recommendations reliable.
Starting in science
Angel is a ‘massive’ Star Trek fan and credits the series with leading her into science. The original series made science feel exciting and expansive, she says.
Family also played a part. When Angel was young, her mother took an introductory chemistry course. Angel helped her study at the kitchen table, and those sessions embedded her love for the field. So she went to the University of Memphis, where she spent three of her four undergraduate years working across two labs: one in polymer chemistry and another with a computational focus that leaned more toward inorganic chemistry.
“I was working between the two,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Oh—I’m quite good at that.’”
That confidence carried her to a PhD in inorganic chemistry at New Orleans’ Tulane University, where she specialised in electrochemistry and physical chemistry, alongside hands-on synthesis and computational modelling. It was, she says, very different” to her work today, but it taught her to be comfortable moving between wet lab work and computation and honed her instinct for how molecules behave under real conditions.
Towards the end of the doctorate she moved back into polymer work, going to Washington University in St Louis to a lab that built artificial molecular muscles and other materials that shift in response to light, heat or other triggers. “It was cutting-edge science that set the stage for a career built on responsive systems, whether the “system” is a polymer network or a living fermentation.
Then she started scanning for international opportunities. The Scion role came up, Angel applied thinking she wouldn’t get a call back, and the rest is history. She’s been at Scion – now part of the Bioeconomy Science Institute – seven and a half years.
Work-life balance
Originally from Memphis, Angel lived in 10 or so different US states before coming to New Zealand. None of them compare to Rotorua. “It’s the best place I’ve ever lived,” she says. “There’s a mix of unique landscapes, a strong local community and plenty of diversity.”
Once a self-described ‘city rat’, Angel developed a taste for the outdoors as a way of blending into Rotorua’s culture. Now she enjoys shorter walks and small hikes. She’s travelled a lot around here since her arrival and says while the South Island is beautiful, she prefers the North. “Having lived in the Pacific Northwest, I’m used to dramatic mountain ranges – so volcanic valleys and geothermal landscapes feel fresh and intriguing.”
She also loves horror movies, has dabbled in painting, enjoys exploring foreign languages and did stand-up comedy once, a long time ago. “I tend to delve deeply into a hobby for a few weeks or months, then move onto something else,” she says.
That curiosity – and a love for making ideas come to life – continues to shape Angel’s scientific path. “I love the idea that curiosity and technology could help solve big problems,” she says. “Connecting the dots is what keeps the work moving forward.
“I really enjoy working with industry and trying to make people’s ideas a reality.”