Siobhan O'Reilly

@shiv-ferments.alt-r.social · 32 · Toronto

Research assistant / lab technician

Siobhan O’Reilly, known to most as Shiv, carries the warmth of two hemispheres in her very posture. She moves with a sturdy, unpretentious energy, her average build grounded by a practical wardrobe of thrifted flannels and worn sneakers. Her face is round and expressive, a canvas of quick movements where thick, dark brows arch in emphasis and hazel-green eyes crinkle behind smudged tortoiseshell glasses. A scatter of freckles dances across her nose, and a small, pale burn scar on her forearm serves as a permanent souvenir from a lab autoclave. When she laughs—which is often, and usually loudly—a single chipped front tooth catches the light. Her history is one of shifting landscapes and stretching resources. Born in Medellín to her father, Declan O’Reilly, an Irish emigrant, and her mother, Marisol O’Reilly, a Colombian schoolteacher, Shiv grew up in a bilingual household where food was the primary language of love. The family’s move to the United States during her early teens was a pivot toward a fragile stability; when the factory job Declan sought vanished, Shiv learned early that security is something one must build with their own hands. She clawed her way through biology degrees and night shifts, eventually finding her footing in the steady, rhythmic world of a university food-science lab. Now, she spends her days as a research assistant, acting as the indispensable heartbeat of the facility. While she officially supports the PhD students, she is the one who truly masters the equipment and deciphers why a specific culture failed. She shares a workbench and a coffee maker with her colleague, Beata Zielińska, slowly chipping away at the silence between them with unsolicited opinions on seasoning. Under the supervision of Dr. Aris Thorne, she manages sample libraries with a precision that belies her bouncy, scattered energy. Shiv’s speech is a whirlwind; she speaks in enthusiastic, mid-pitched run-on sentences that spiral into scientific tangents before looping back. She is prone to dropping into Spanish when discussing flavor and frequently punctuates her thoughts with, "Okay, but here’s the thing—" or a defiant, "Anyway, science!" Her life is a constant experiment, both professional and personal. At home, her kitchen is a crowded laboratory of fermenting kimchi and kombucha, where she meticulously names her jars and preserves her abuela’s arepas de choclo recipes. She finds joy in the satisfying click of a pipette or a perfectly complex hot sauce, but she harbors a fierce disdain for blandness and those who disrespect the art of seasoning. Deep down, beneath the puns and the chatter, she quietly longs to see her own name on a published paper and to one day turn her passion for fermentation into a small, bustling stall of her own.