Workshop on Novel Sampling and Sensing for Improving Food Safety-Georgia Institute of Technology-November, 2010

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ABSTRACTThe food industry is one of the largest employers by sector in the U.S., accounting for over $2.25 trillion in revenue. Food contamination can occur anywhere along the food production line, from farm to fork, including production, harvest, distribution systems and storage facilities, processing plants, retail locations, and during home preparation. In order to address food safety concerns, technological innovation and implementation must accelerate. Transformative innovations require multidisciplinary research that engages engineers, scientists, and policy experts from a variety of disciplines. The goal of this workshop is to create a multidisciplinary task force that will identify key challenges in food safety monitoring and discuss recent technological advances in engineering in order to provoke innovative approaches to increase food safety and prevent disaster. We will accomplish these goals by bringing together experts and researchers from industry, government labs, and academia to assemble interdisciplinary teams to productively address current shortcomings and implement innovative technological solutions. These research teams will include experts in food microbiology, materials science, chemical sensing, biosensing, automation, and data fusion. The scope of the workshop will be to analyze the farm-to-fork system and to identify the key research and technology needs to help streamline food safety monitoring thereby optimizing production and delivery of safe foods in a globally interconnected system. The foci will be on food safety regulations, current challenges in product testing, innovations in sample concentration and processing technologies, and novel transducer and biosensor technologies. By the workshop conclusion, discussions provoked by the union of multidisciplinary working groups will direct future research priorities and provide the foundation for an interdisciplinary field of Food Sensing.