Symposium Keynote Speakers
Leading the discussion on the future of high-throughput sequencing in food safety
Dr. Eric W. Brown
Office of Applied Microbiology and Technology
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Dr. Eric W. Brown has served at the FDA's Human Foods Program since 1999 and currently directs the Division of Food Safety Genomics, overseeing a team of 45 researchers and support scientists. His laboratory has been pivotal in incorporating next-generation sequencing technologies into foodborne outbreak investigations and establishing preventive control and compliance standards at the FDA.
Dr. Brown's work has been instrumental in developing the GenomeTrakr whole-genome sequencing network for food safety. He earned his M.Sc. in Microbiology from the National Cancer Institute/Hood College Joint Program and his Ph.D. in Microbial Genetics from The George Washington University.
Dr. Marc W. Allard
Office of Laboratory Operations & Applied Science
Human Foods Program, FDA
Dr. Marc W. Allard is a pioneering scientist who helped establish GenomeTrakr, the first distributed network of laboratories utilizing whole genome sequencing for pathogen identification and traceback. His groundbreaking work has revolutionized food safety and provides an economic benefit of over a billion dollars annually in averted illnesses.
Dr. Allard specializes in both phylogenetic analyses and biochemical laboratory methods for generating WGS information. He joined the FDA in 2008 and uses WGS to identify and characterize outbreaks of bacterial strains, particularly Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria. He received a B.A. from the University of Vermont and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Dr. Anthony Kougkas
Illinois Institute of Technology
Deputy Director, Gnosis Research Center
Dr. Anthony Kougkas is the creator and co-principal investigator of IOWarp, a $5 million National Science Foundation funded project designed to accelerate scientific data management. His expertise lies at the intersection of High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence, focusing on AI-driven data management solutions for scientific discovery.
Through collaborations with national laboratories and research teams, Dr. Kougkas creates agile and scalable data solutions that empower researchers to unlock insights from complex scientific data. He holds a Guest Research Faculty position at Argonne National Laboratory and leads the development of IOWarp, an AI-powered platform that transforms how researchers interact with large genomic datasets.
