Pre-Conference Speakers
Development of Risk-Based Meat Safety Assurance Systems (RB-MSAS)
Dr. Barb Masters
Dr. Barb Masters is the Vice President of Regulatory Policy, Food and Agriculture at Tyson Foods, Inc., where she provides enterprise regulatory vision and support. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Partnership for Food Safety Education, Center for Foodborne Illness, and the Steering Committee for GFSI. Dr. Masters spent nine years as a Senior Policy Advisor at Olsson Frank Weeda, where she worked closely to advise with the meat and poultry industry to ensure regulatory compliance. She served as Administrator of the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service where she established a solid infrastructure of science-based policies and data analysis to reduce foodborne illness and product recalls. Dr. Masters holds her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from Mississippi State University and a Food Animal Internship from Kansas State University.
Maybritt Kiel Poulsen
Maybritt Kiel Poulsen is a DVM graduated from the Royal Veterinary University in Copenhagen in 1997. Previously, she has worked for the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration for 20 years as a meat inspector in cattle-, pig-, and poultry slaughterhouses. Currently, she is working at the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, where she has been involved in modernization of meat inspection for several years.
Madalena Vieira-Pinto
Professor at the UTAD Department of Veterinary Sciences in the area of Meat Inspection. Scientific coordinator of training courses on game meat hygiene in Portugal. Vice-Director of the UTAD Research Centre for Animal and Veterinary Science. Responsible for the Trichinella analysis service at the UTAD Laboratory of Technology, Quality and Food Safety. The main research is focused on zoonoses and zoonotic agents in the context of meat inspection of slaughtered animals for human consumption (mainly game, pigs and poultry), as well ason animal welfare.
Vice-President of WAVES-Portugal (Euro-Mediterranean Society for Wild Animal Surveillance).
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8588-7071
Anne Klottrup
Anne Klottrup is a DVM graduated from the Royal Veterinary University of Copenhagen in 2000. And has a master degree in assessment of farm animal welfare from The University of Aarhus, Denmark (2015). Currently, she is working as a Special Veterinary Adviser in The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration, in The Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries. She primarily works with development of legislation on food of animal origin in The EU. Nationally, she works with modernization of the Danish meat inspection system. Previously, she has worked as an official veterinarian in cattle-, pig-, and sheep slaughterhouses, cutting plants, cold stores, meat product companies, etc. and with animal welfare and veterinary medicine in organick production.
WGS, NGS, and ’Omics: What are they and how can I use them?
Noelle Noyes
Noelle Noyes is an Assistant Professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota (thenoyeslab.org). Her lab uses molecular and traditional epidemiological methods to improve our understanding of microbial ecology within protein production systems. Areas of focus include microbial ecology related to food safety, antimicrobial resistance and public health, pathogen behavior and animal health and performance. She specializes in molecular and bioinformatic methods development, and she is the co-founder of the MEGARes database and AMR++ bioinformatic pipeline (megares.meglab.org)
Aaron Asmus
Aaron Asmus is the Director of Lab Services and Refrigerated Foods Product Development for Hormel Foods. In his current role, Aaron leads research efforts in food safety and quality, product and process development, thermal processing, and analytical chemistry for both Hormel Foods and Jennie-O Turkey Store. Additionally, Aaron is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Comparative and Molecular Biosciences from the University of Minnesota, under the guidance of Dr. Noelle Noyes. His research interest is understanding the dynamics of the fresh pork microbiome and potential relationships to food safety.
Shawn Bearson
Shawn Bearson is a Research Microbiologist at the USDA, ARS, National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa. Her research program focuses on three factors that influence Salmonella colonization, transmission, and persistence in food animals, particularly swine and turkeys: virulence mechanisms of Salmonella (comparative genomics), the tactical response from the host (transcriptomics), and interactions with the host microbiota residing within the gastrointestinal tract (16S rRNA microbiome analysis). Current research efforts are investigating genetic features of emerging Salmonella outbreak isolates associated with food animals, examining antimicrobial resistance transfer in multidrug-resistant (MDR) Salmonella serovars, and identifying intervention strategies to decrease Salmonella on the farm.