Scientific Committee

Isabelle Virlogeux-Payant

INRAE Centre Val de Loire, French National for Agriculture, Food and Environment

She hold her PhD and her HDR in Microbiology. Her research activities focus on the characterization of Salmonella virulence factors and on the regulation of their expression.

She is the co-head of the group "Signalling, carriage and virulence of bacteria” in the Infectious Diseases and Public Health Department. The team is interested in analyzing the virulence mechanisms of Salmonella, especially its interaction with host cells, and the asymptomatic carrier state in chicken, including the role of the intestinal microbiota. She has long experience in national, transnational (Emida, Infect-Era, Anihwa) and european projects as partner and WP leader.  

Guntram GRASSL (Germany)

Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hospital Epidemiology, Hannover Medical School

Guntram Grassl is an Associate Professor of Medical Microbiomics at the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hospital Epidemiology at Hannover Medical School and at the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), partner site Hannover-Braunschweig. During his PhD thesis he worked on invasion mechanisms of Yersinia enterocolitica.

Fascinated by the incredible repertoire of gram-negative pathogens to manipulate host cells he moved on to specialize in the field of host-pathogen-microbiota interactions. His research aims to better understand how Salmonella and other enteropathogenic bacteria colonize and induce inflammatory responses in the host and how these interactions are affected by host glycans and can be modulated by intestinal microbiota.  

Marianne CHEMALY (France)

PhD, HDR in Food microbiology, is heading the HQPAP Unit in Anses and leading scientific projects related to the poultry production.

Her research activities focus on the “control of zoonotic pathogens (Salmonella, Campylobacter, …) in poultry production using a multifactorial approach” and cover the global chain from farms to forks. The main topics deal with the prevalence and molecular epidemiology, Host-pathogen interactions and control measures. She is involved in several EU projects and coordinates workpackages under different programmes (FP6, FP7, Emida Era-Net programs, H2020).

She is actively involved in expertise through participation in different working groups as expert on Salmonella and Campylobacter at the national, EU and international levels. M. Chemaly is currently member of the “Biohaz” expert panel within the European Food Safety Authority, EFSA.

Darius WASYL (Poland)

National Veterinary Research Institute

Dariusz WASYL is a veterinarian working at the National Veterinary Research Institute in Poland. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Microbiology and Head of Department of Omics Analyses. His professional interests covers Salmonella and salmonellosis, antimicrobial resistance in Enterobacteriaceae, veterinary microbiology, epidemiology and public health and bacterial genomics. He is principal investigator at National Reference Laboratory for Salmonellosis and Antimicrobial Resistance and actively participates in both networks of relevant EU RLs. He was a member of expert working groups of European Food Safety Authority Joint Programming Initiative and participates in Codex Alimentarius Intergovernmental Task Force on Antimicrobial Resistance. He participated in several national and international research projects on epidemiology of salmonellosis and antimicrobial resistance. He was a lecturer and tutor at post-graduate trainings and BTSF courses.

Laurent GUILLIER (France)

French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES)

Dr. Laurent Guillier, PhD, in Food microbiology. Since 2006, he has been working in the French food safety agency on microbial risk assessment, genomics, modelling, source attribution, and sampling.

He was in charge of the scientific coordination of several French ANR projects. He has been also involved in several European project (BFR/DTU/ANSES RAKIP project, EFSA CALL BIOCONTAM, H2020-COMPARE, EJPOH LISTADAPT, ...). He published more than 70 scientific peer reviewed articles and gave more than 25 oral presentations in national or international conferences.

He has been involved in expertise and the coordination of expert groups for more than 40 Anses’ opinions.

 Koen DE REU (Belgium)

Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO)

Dr. ir. Koen De Reu is senior researcher and group leader on microbiological food safety at the Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO), Melle, Belgium. His research activities focus on microbiological food quality and safety with attention to the primary animal production and the control of zoonotic pathogens. His research group has special attention for Salmonella contamination in the meat and egg processing chain, Listeria monocytogenes contamination in the food industry, cleaning and disinfection in the agro-food chain, biofilms, disinfection susceptibility and antibiotic resistance. He is author of more than 60 peer review papers and is promotor of different PhD students. 

Benoît DOUBLET (France)

INRAE Research Director - Head of research group on Genomic Plasticity Biodiversity and Antimicrobial Resistance - Infection & Public Health Unit - French National Institute of Research for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE)

Dr Benoît Doublet has more than 15 years expertise in the field of antibiotic resistance of veterinary and zoonotic Gram-negative pathogens. Since 2014, he has led an INRA research group which carries out fundamental research using genetic and multidisciplinary approaches to study the biology of multidrug resistance mobile genetic elements such as plasmids and integrative elements carrying critically-important antibiotic resistance genes. The main scientific interest of his group is understanding of the biology (horizontal genetic transfer, maintenance, incompatibility/exclusion and cooperation) of multidrug resistance mobile genetic elements such as plasmids and integrative elements carrying antimicrobial resistance genes in epidemic foodborne bacteria. Dr Doublet has published more than 60 research articles (h-index=22).

Patrick MCDERMOTT (United States of America)

Director, National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System - Director, Division of Animal and Food Microbiology - FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine, Office of Research - Laurel, MD USA

Dr. Patrick McDermott has worked for over 25 years’ in the field of antimicrobial resistance. Since 2008, he has served as Director of the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) at the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine, Office of Research, where is also is Director of the Division of Animal and Food Microbiology. NARMS was established in 1996 and is an interagency collaborative effort between the FDA, USDA and CDC that tracks antibiotic resistance in bacteria from retail meats, food producing animals and human clinical cases of infection. DAFM performs the retail meat testing component of NARMS, and conducts microbiological research related to animal health and food safety.  His work is aimed at understanding the mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance in foodborne microorganisms, how they emerge and spread, and the impact of interventions designed to limit resistance in food animal production. Most recently he has been focused on the incorporation of genomic sequencing technologies into resistant surveillance. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and recipient of the FDA’s Francis Kelsey award for excellence and courage in protecting the public health.

François-Xavier WEILL (France)

Professor - Enteric Bacterial Pathogens Unit - Institut Pasteur

François-Xavier Weill, MD, PhD has been heading the Enteric Bacterial Pathogens Research and Expertise Unit, which hosts two French National Reference Centres and one World Health Organization Collaborative Centre. Between 2014 and 2016, he was a visiting scientist in the Bacterial Genomics and Evolution group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK. His research interests are the population structure and transmission dynamics of emerging, epidemic, and antimicrobial drug resistant enteric bacterial pathogens, as well as molecular and genomic epidemiology, and the development of new diagnostic tools for these pathogens.

Jay HINTON (United Kingdom)

Group Head Institute of Integrative Biology - University of Liverpool

Jay Hinton is the Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis at the University of Liverpool, UK. He did his first degree in Microbiology, when he was inspired to think genetically by Prof. George Salmond.  After his PhD, he moved to the University of Oxford to work on the regulation of virulence gene expression in Salmonella, and subsequently moved to Norwich, UK, as Head of Molecular Microbiology at the Institute of Food Research.

He has been fascinated by bacterial functional genomics for the past 20 years. In 2003, he pioneered a transcriptomic approach that revealed a "snapshot" of Salmonella gene expression during the process of infection of mammalian cells, and co-discovered the H-NS-mediated mechanism of silencing gene expression in bacteria in 2006.

He refocused his lab after moving to Liverpool in 2012, and he now uses a combination of genomics and functional transcriptomics to bring new insights to the lethal epidemic of bloodstream infections caused by Salmonella in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, his team determined the role of a single noncoding nucleotide in the over-expression of a key virulence factor in African Salmonella (Hammarlöf et al, PNAS).

He was elected to membership of the European Academy of Microbiology in 2018.

Anne BRISABOIS (France)

ANSES Alfort - French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety

Dr Anne Brisabois, Senior Microbiologist and Research Director, is currently Deputy Head of the Laboratory for Food Safety dedicated to the surveillance and characterization of foodborne pathogens. She was during 20 years, at the head of the Bacterial Characterization and Epidemiology Unit of this laboratory, specialized on surveillance and characterization of main foodborne bacterial pathogens, Salmonella, Listeria, Staphylococci, Bacillus including antimicrobial resistance aspect and she conducted National and European Research programs based on the development of molecular characterization of them. Besides, she manages the Fishery and Aquaculture Department related to microbial and chemical contaminants in seafood products, especially on emergence of antimicrobial resistance and microplastic issues. She coordinates a national and regional funded project covering the aquatic sector studies from the marine environment to the quality and safety of food products. She has a several years’ experience in the management of research projects in microbiology and foodborne pathogens surveillance with more than 80 publications in international peer reviewed Journals.

Padmini RAMACHANDRAN (United States of America)

Research Microbiologist - Centre for Food Safety and Applied Nutirtion, Food and Drug Administration

Padmini Ramachandran is a Research Fellow in Division of Microbiology at FDA’s Office of Regulatory Science. Her research interests include using metagenomics to track foodborne pathogens, species identification of insects and plants using organelle genomes. She also specializes in data visualization and data modeling of next gen sequencing data. She also works to provide target and non target metagenomic data to describe ecologies associated with high risk crops and foods.

Nathalie JOURDAN DA SILVA (France)

Santé Publique France - French Institute for Public Health Surveillance

Senior medical epidemiologist at Santé publique France, the French national public health agency,  in the Department of Infectious diseases in the unit Enteric and Foodborne Infections and Zoonoses.

In charge of  infectious intestinal diseases and foodborne infections.

Responsible for disease surveillance and outbreak investigations, analysis and reporting of gastrointestinal diseases in France, including the overseas territories

Supervisor of the outbreak investigations by the EPIET fellows and interns in the agency.

One of her main fields of interest are  the development of innovative methods for outbreak investigations such as the use of electronic supermarket data from shopper cards, optimizing collaboration with teams in charge of trace back and food safety, developing fast and efficient methods to constitute control populations and obtain control exposure data in outbreak settings.

Expert at the Scientific  Expert Committee on biological risks (BIORISK) at the French Agency for Food, -Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) since 2012

Author or co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications

Robert TAUXE (United States of America)

Director - Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases - National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - Atlanta, Georgia

Dr. Robert Tauxe is Director of the CDC Division charged with prevention and control of foodborne, waterborne and fungal infections.   The Division monitors the frequency of these infections in the United States, investigates outbreaks, develops the science and promotes the policies that will help prevent the disease, disability and deaths that they cause. 

Dr. Tauxe graduated from Yale University in 1975, and received his medical degree from Vanderbilt Medical School. He completed an internal medicine residency, trained at CDC in the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and joined CDC staff in 1985.

His interests include bacterial enteric diseases, epidemiology and pathogenesis of infectious diseases, epidemiologic and clinical consequences of bacterial genetic exchange, antimicrobial use and resistance to antimicrobial agents, and teaching epidemiologic methods.  His faculty appointments include the School of Public Health and the Department of Biology at Emory University, Atlanta.

Dr. Tauxe has written/co-authored 301 journal articles, letters and book chapters.