Bronwen Percival

Bronwen Percival is the cheese buyer for Neal’s Yard Dairy in London. In addition to working with cheesemakers and the company’s maturation team to optimise the quality of the cheese they sell, she works to mobilise collaboration between cheesemakers and the scientific community.   In 2012 Bronwen instigated a biennial conference on the Science of Artisan Cheese, bringing together scientists, cheesemakers, and public health officials from three continents. In 2014, she spent two months in the Dutton Lab at Harvard University studying the microbial communities on cheese rinds. Bronwen sits on the editorial board of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Cheese, and also recently coordinated and edited an English translation of the French textbook The Microbiology of Raw Milk. Along with Dr Benjamin Wolfe, a microbiologist from Tufts University, she founded MicrobialFoods.org, a website dedicated to making the science of artisan fermented foods available to the general public. 
Together with her husband Francis, Bronwen cofounded and hosts the London Gastronomy Seminars, a long-running series of lectures dedicated to making the technical side of food and drink fun and accessible. The Percivals are currently writing a book about the evolving relationship between cheesemaking and science for the University of California Press.