AOAC ISPAM Meeting eBook, March 17 2015

PRESENTER BIOS (Continued)

EFSTATHIA PAPAFRAGKOU, FDA PRESENTER: Challenges to Testing for Food-bourne Viruses in Food Samples

Dr. Efstathia (Efi) Papafragkou earned her Ph.D in 2007 in Food Microbiology from North Carolina State University. Her thesis focused on the persistence, transfer and detection of human enteric viruses in foods. Dr. Papafragkou was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the American Society of Microbiology and joined the National Calicivirus Laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a post-doctoral research associate at CDC, she completed her training and specialized on the application of cell culture techniques for cultivation of foodborne viruses. In 2010 she became a member of the Molecular Virology Team at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the Food and Drug Administration. Her research interests include method development for sample preparation, molecular detection, characterization and cell culture for quantifying foodborne pathogenic viruses from food, clinical and environmental samples. She is also involved in method validation studies, and teaching/training courses. Since joining FDA she continues to communicate her research through publications, participation in professional conferences, and presentation in scientific meetings and workshops. FABIENNE LOISY-HARMON, ceeram PRESENTER: ISO Technical Specifications of Viruses: How are they Relevant to Service Laboratories and Assay Manufacturers? Fabienne Loisy-Hamon has a PhD in microbiology with a specialty in molecular virology. She has been studying human enteric viruses in environment and food samples since 12 years, developing molecular methods for the detection of these viruses and studying their persistence in different types of environment. From 2005 to 2014, she was, with Benoît Lebeau, the co-founder and CSO of ceeram, a company specialized in molecular identification of microbial agents. She is now bioMérieux food business- R&D virology manager. She is an expert member for the European Committee of Normalization, for Afnor and also Afssa in working groups concerning food borne viruses and molecular detection of food and feed pathogens. She has been publishing several papers and giving several oral communication in international conferences concerning viruses subject. Her expertise is so worldwide recognized. In July 2013, ceeram was the recipient of the “Food Safety Innovation Award” for its expertise in food borne viruses.