12th International Conference on
Predictive Modelling in Food

Professor Kostas Koutsoumanis
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
"New developments in microbial inactivation"

Kostas Koutsoumanis is currently serving as a Professor, Head of Laboratory of Food Microbiology and Hygiene and Head of the Department of Food Science and Technology in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He received his B.S. degree in Agriculture Engineering from the Agricultural University of Athens, Greece, in 1997 and Ph.D. (Food Science) degree from the same University in 2000. After serving as a Research Associate in the Department of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University he took a Lecturer position in the Department of Food Science and Technology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2002, and he was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2007, Associate Professor in 2013 and Professor in 2017. Currently, he teaches several graduate and MSc courses including General Microbiology, Food Quality and Safety Assurance, Predictive Microbiology and Risk Assessment and Applied Statistics in Food Science. From 2011 he is a member, from 2015 to 2018 the vice-Chair and from 2018 the Chair of the Biohazard panel of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). He is also a member of Joint FAO/WHO Expert Meeting on Microbiological Risk Assessment (JEMRA) roster of experts. He is Associate editor in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology and member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Food Protection, International Journal of Food Microbiology, Food Microbiology and Current Opinion in Food Science. As a principal investigator or co-investigator, Kostas Koutsoumanis has received over 3 million euros in grants, contracts or donations for research in the field of microbiological quality and safety of foods. Recent research efforts have centered on the microbiological quality and safety of fresh and processed food products, predictive microbiology, microbial risk assessment, stochastic modeling approaches in food safety and quality, development and application of Time Temperature Indicators (TTI) for monitoring food quality and safety, etc. The research results have been presented and published at more than 180 refereed scientific journal articles, 15 book chapters, and 150 papers in conference proceedings with more than 8500 citations and h-index=55.

Dr. Laurent Guillier
ANSES, France
“Application of Omics on the predictive modelling”

Dr Laurent Guillier has an initial formation of food microbiologist engineer. He defended his PhD thesis in 2005 on predictive microbiology. To this date, I joined the INRA laboratory for a one-year post-doc where he conducted research on modelling bacterial competition in biofilm.
From December 2006 to now, he has been working in the French food safety agency on quantitative risk assessments, genomics, modelling, microbiology, and sampling.
He has been in charge of the scientific coordination of several French ANR projects: Quant’HACCP (Microbiological quantitative risk assessment as a support to establish control measures based on food safety objectives), Na- (Reasoned improvement of raw and cooked cured meats production in relation with the reduction of the salt and sodium content), Ecosec (reducing the environmental impact of hygiene procedures in refrigerated food processing plants through optimal use of air drying), Opticold (For an Eco-designed cold chain – optimizing energy consumption, safety, quality and shelf-life of refrigerated processed foods), Pathofood (Deciphering the cell heterogeneity and the spatial distribution of pathogens in food matrices in interaction with microbial communities).
Since 2015, He has been involved in several European projects (BFR/DTU/ANSES RAKIP project, Efsa call BIOCONTAM, H2020-COMPARE, EJPOH LISTADAPT and CARE, PRIMA-ARTISANEFOOD). More specifically, he conducts modelling, bioinformatics analysis, and source attribution.
He also participated as a scientific expert for more than 60 opinions of the French Agency of Food Safety (ANSES), three for EFSA (meat transport) and two for FAO/WHO (histamine and Listeria monocytogenes).
He published more than 100 scientific peer-reviewed articles and gave more than 40 oral presentations at national or international conferences. He reviewed more than 100 articles (International Journal of Food Microbiology, Frontiers, Food Microbiology…).

Dr. Albert Garre
Technical University of Cartagena, Spain
"Variability and uncertainity in the modelling”

Alberto Garre is a researcher at the Department of Food Engineering at the Technical University of Cartagena (Spain). He obtained his PhD in predictive microbiology from Cartagena in 2018 and his research activities include (I) the application and development of kinetic models, (II) stochastic modelling, (III) the application of other modelling approaches (e.g. network-based models), (IV) Optimal Experiment Design and (V) development of scientific software.