TRAINING FOOD SAFETY SCIENTISTS: COLLABORATION: Public-private partnership gets under way to teach U.S. practices

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and Waters Corp. have teamed up to establish the world’s first facility dedicated to training international scientists about U.S. food safety standards and methods of analysis. The International Food Safety Training Laboratory is expected to open next year in College Park, Md., and it will be operated by the Joint Institute for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition, a partnership between the University of Maryland and the Food & Drug Administration. Waters, a Massachusetts-based analytical instrument company, will fund the lab’s construction and provide state-of-the-art equipment, Waters President Art Caputo said at a briefing on May 21. The company will also help design the training programs, he noted. “The task of ensuring food safety can only be accomplished through a comprehensive partnership,” Caputo emphasized. “We are here with a solution to address the fundamental need to increase scientific-capacity building worldwide.” The lab is intended to support FDA’s food safety goals, ...