The 25th Highest Ranked On The WSL Longboard Tour Is A Biomolecular Engineer

He lives in Avalon. His lady has a firm grasp on a drum set and he’s a chemical and biomolecular engineer. Welcome to the peculiar life of Max Weston. Obviously, he’s not your average surfer. 

The 27-year-old regular-footer rides a log and took a lot of guff for it when he was a grom in South Oz. But being that a small percentage of surfers can make a living off of riding their surfboard, and an even smaller percentage off of tiptoeing up the nose of a heavily glassed log, Max pursued a different, and dare we say, smarter route. You see, Weston’s scientific focus is something called “biosensors,” which as he explains, aid in medical diagnosis, disease detection, food waste and environmental monitoring.

“Food waste is a really big problem that gets overlooked,” Weston says in the new episode of O’Neill’s “O’Riginals” series. “It’s quite common to eat half a hamburger and throw in the in the bin. To consider the impact of that, I guess you have to really consider the resources that go into producing food. It’s a massively resource-intense industry, so when you throw away your food, you’re throwing away the energy, water, often an animal’s life, infrastructure that was used to transport that food, and it all just gets discarded.”

Weston’s trying to figure out a way to change this. 

But the lab isn’t all consuming. He’s also ranked 25th on the WSL Longboard Tour. 

So, the next time one of those surfy parents you know tells you they’re considering putting their kid in homeschool to “chase the dream,” quickly point out to them what Weston’s doing.