Hospitality Graduate Jessica Murray Joins WSU Faculty

By Sue McMurray

It’s fairly uncommon when a student who earns two bachelor’s, a master’s, and a doctorate at the same institution stays on to become a faculty member there.

But for alumna Jessica Murray, a new scholarly assistant professor in the School of Hospitality Business Management (SHBM), it made sense.

She’s spent the last 11 years at WSU working on her education and career, gaining culinary, research, and teaching experience as she completed multiple degrees in hospitality and food science. Her broad focus and skills aligned perfectly for a faculty position in the hospitality program and cross disciplinary research opportunities in agricultural tourism and food science.

In fall 2023, she joined the hospitality school’s faculty and is team teaching a course on the fundamentals of cooking with Executive Chef Mat Morgan and a business course that addresses environmental practices and principles in global travel and tourism. She also has a 20 percent time research appointment and will be leading study abroad experiences in Italy, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.

“WSU is unique in that it offers interdepartmental and interdegree study opportunities,” Murray says. “There are lots of avenues that work for people who want to pursue more than one path. Initially, I hadn’t considered doing a second bachelor’s degree in food science or going on to earn graduate degrees, but seeing the direct application of what I was learning to real issues intrigued me.”

Though Murray’s academic journey seems very linear, it didn’t start that way.

A unique path to WSU

Growing up on a farm in Woodland, a small town near Vancouver, Washington, Murray wasn’t even sure she would go to college. She knew she wanted a culinary career, but as a first-generation student, she wasn’t sure a four-year degree would be attainable or necessary. The chefs she worked with while attending culinary school part-time during her high school years thought otherwise. They encouraged her to go to community college and then apply to culinary schools and to WSU’s highly ranked hospitality program.

“While I had decided to pursue a culinary career, I knew I didn’t want to be a line cook forever,” Murray says. “The hospitality program seemed like a way for me to be flexible. WSU was one of the only schools in the state that had a hospitality program, and it was also ranked as one of the best in the country.”

The other influencing factor: she needed a job. She visited the Marriott Foundation Hospitality and Culinary Innovation Center and talked with former Executive Chef Jamie Callison and also interviewed with the center’s student HR lead. She was hired to work on the catering team before classes started.

“As long as I was willing to say ‘yes’ to experiences, people were willing to give me opportunities,” she says.

For example, while she was working as the lead pastry chef for SHBM catering, Craig Morris, director of the USDA-ARS Western Wheat Quality Lab, asked the team to bake some goods with some flour he was testing. From that interaction, Morris wanted to hire Murray. Summer research opportunities developed, which led to the USDA funding Murray’s master’s project in the  WSU School of Food Science. She tested and developed recipes for soft durum wheat flour that doesn’t require energy-intensive milling.

“We were able to transfer the research directly to the consumer in products served at WSU’s Feast of the Arts and at local restaurants including Lodgepole, Black Cypress, and Porch Light Pizza, where the flour is used in pizza dough.

Once she completed her master’s degree, Murray planned to do her dissertation on wine pairings with Asian-fusion foods, but the pandemic shut down the opportunity. She worked with Robert Harrington, SHBM director, to create a new project exploring the role of agricultural tourism on food systems and consumption. As the CEO of her family’s agricultural tourism company, Murray brings personal experience to her research in this growing industry.

“I love helping WSU students match their passions with careers in hospitality whether it’s event planning, cuisine, hotel management, tech, or something else,” she says. “Figuring out what’s next as a land-grant university as education and industry evolve is an exciting challenge.”