Alumni & Friends : Alumni Profiles

From Marshmallows to Mars

Tamsin Campbell
MBA '92

To microbes, a few molecules of H2O look like a great place to raise a family. It’s aspirations like these that keep Tamsin Campbell in business.

As president and CEO of Decagon Devices, Inc. — a company her father launched in 1983 — Campbell, MBA ’92, helps steer the technology that has won the company the business of 80 of the top 100 food companies when it comes to ensuring that products are safe from bacterial growth.

Decagon’s edge in the market stems in part from their focus on measuring “water activity” in foods — jerky, marshmallows, bread, or just about anything that isn’t powder dry — rather than water content. Think of water activity as bachelor and bachelorette water molecules. While some water molecules are bound to salts and chemicals, others fly solo. It’s these freewheeling water molecules, the ones that microbes need to grow, that matter. Thus, every food recipe has a different level of safe moisture content, but every recipe has the identical level of safe water activity. Decagon’s instruments that quickly and accurately measure the latter help companies save big on time and money in food development and quality control.

While Campbell lives and works in Pullman, Wash. in the beautifully idyllic region known as The Palouse, Decagon has its sites on a distant target. The company will travel to Mars with a specially designed probe incorporated into the Phoenix Mission rover that will land on Mars in 2007. Stuck into a scoop of Martian soil, the probe will report any presence of unfrozen water. If found, it would be the first indicator that Mars could potentially sustain organic life — and that’s the kind of work that doesn’t just go down on a resume, it goes down in history.