Category Archives: Project Updates

Digital farm-to-facility food safety testing optimization

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A two year project funded by the:

With the following 4 objectives:

  • Build a Field-to-Facility generic supply chain model of produce safety testing.
  • Adapt the supply chain and collect parameters to represent a variety of commodities with distinct risk profiles and risk-management options.
  • Optimize testing across the supply chain of each commodity incorporating representative testing programs at primary production, harvesting, receiving, processing, and packing and assessing their impact to manage safety.

More information on the project can be found in the funder’s database.

Improving Microbial Food Safety Through Engineering and Statistical Approaches in Food Microbiology

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A 5-year project funded by USDA NIFA Hatch funds which represented a significant portion of my group’s startup funds.

Objective

To support the long-term goal of developing a flexible applied food safety laboratory, Hatch funds will be used to support the following initial, discrete projects:

  • Genomics and Engineering Tools for Persistent Pathogen Identification and Control.
  • Single-Kernel Sorting to Remove Mycotoxins from Cereals.
  • Systems Approaches to Valuing Reductions in Foodborne Pathogen Contamination of Foods.

More information can be found on the funder’s database.

 

Simulating Large-Number Bulk-Product Sampling to Improve Food Safety Sampling Plans

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A 2-year externally funded project by:

This project will build a simulation model to solve the problem of how to best take many samples of bulk products for food safety testing. That way, industries can use that knowledge to create sampling plans, and sampling devices, for their products that achieve important food safety goals. The general objective of this project is to build a validated and ready-to-use simulation model of bulk product sampling to improving sampling plans. The specific aims are:

  • Specific Aim 1. Build a bulk product sampling simulation model for food safety testing.
  • Specific Aim 2. Validate the simulation model against reported bulk product sampling.
  • Specific Aim 3. Validate corn-aflatoxin simulation against experimental Texas corn sampling.
  • Specific Aim 4. Build a user interface to parameterize the simulation model by answering a series of web-based questions.

ILSI, and my group, is committed to open, honest science particularly when industry stakeholder come together to aggregate support for important projects such as this.  Therefore, you can find a complete pre-registration of this project under the Open Science Framework:

Project Public Registration

And additional information on the funder’s website of projects.

There is a video update of a poster presentation at IAFP 2019 here