The colors were familiar, their smells almost nostalgic. Yet something was missing. The bananas, mangoes and pineapples came not from Indonesia but from the Philippines and Thailand.

For Sastia, an alumna of the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) in West Java who at that time had spent seven years in Japan, the moment was both ordinary and unsettling. How could a country famed for its mega biodiversity be invisible in one of Asia’s most sophisticated food markets?

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“We often boast about Indonesia’s extraordinary natural wealth but abroad, or at least in Japan, people simply aren't aware of it. Our products seem to be local heroes that can't quite break out of the domestic market,” she said.

That quiet realization would reshape her path as a scientific researcher.

Sastia did not begin her career in food. She arrived in Japan in 2004 as a UNESCO trainee and later completed her master’s and doctoral degrees on a Japanese government scholarship. Her early work focused on metabolic engineering for renewable energy, an area driven by the urgency of a potential fuel crisis.

Since 2011, she has spent years engineering microbes to produce biofuels as part of a joint research project between Japan and the United States. Along the way, she developed deep expertise in metabolomics, an emerging field that involves comprehensive profiling of metabolites in biological specimens, as defined by the US National Institutes of Health.

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