Alvin Lee

Title

Director of the Center for Processing Innovation

Company

Institute for Food Safety and Health (IFSH)

Presentation description:

Safety and technology roundup: High-pressure inactivation of enteric pathogens in raw pet foods—Alvin Lee, Ph.D., director of the Center for Processing Innovation at the Institute for Food Safety and Health (IFSH), provides results of a study evaluating high-pressure processing (HPP) to inactivate common pathogens threatening the fast-growing category of raw pet food, including Salmonella, E. coli and L. monoctyogenes. The research studied eight raw diets containing various proteins to understand the HPP conditions used to inactivate enteric pathogens in these diets, define HPP parameters that impact microbial inactivation in the raw foods and parameters for conducting validation and challenge studies.

Experience:

Alvin Lee, Ph.D., is a microbiologist and virologist with more than 20 years’ research experience and a doctorate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. He currently is director of the Institute for Food Safety and Health (IFSH) Center for Processing Innovation and co-leads the joint IFSH/FDA Microbiology Research Platform on food safety and defense related projects. Lee is a member of the executive board of NoroCORE, a USDA-NIFA Food Virology Collaborative based at North Carolina State University, and leads the Prevention and Control CORE. His research focuses on food processing technologies including high-pressure processing, pulsed light, high-powered ultrasound, gaseous technology and legacy thermal technologies to inactivate pathogens. Lee is a reviewer on several scientific journals and publications, and lead instructor for Food Safety Preventive Controls for Human Foods. He teaches food microbiology within the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at the Illinois Institute of Technology and has mentored more than 30 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.