Dr. József Baranyi

Scientific Advisor, Institute of Nutrition, University of Debrecen, Hungary
Doctor Honoris Causa and Honorary Professor, Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
 
József Baranyi is a Hungarian-British mathematician, who worked for the Institute of Food Research in the United Kingdom for 26 years, leading the Computational Microbiology Research Group there. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Physics Department of Imperial College in London through 2012-2019. After retirement in the UK, he became a Scientific Advisor at the University of Debrecen, Hungary.
He has coordinated or participated in several UK and international projects; authored or co-authored >100 research papers.  He was the Statistical Advisor of the Journal of Applied Microbiology for 14 years and Editorial Board member at the Applied and Environmental Microbiology for 15 years, for which he received the “Distinguished Service Award” of the American Society for Microbiology. He is also an elected member of the International Academy of Food Science and Technology, the prime advisory body of the International Union of Food Science and Technology.
His mission has been to translate mathematical / computational concepts and methods into application in food science, industry and regulation. The mathematical model named after him is one of the most used models in predictive food microbiology. He developed a database ontology for that became the predecessor of the ComBase system (www.combase.cc), co-funded by him. ComBase has grown to be one of the most used food-related international databases. He held >200 courses as above around the world, primarily for food scientists.

Professor Konstantinos Koutsoumanis

Member of the Scientific Committee of EFSA
Professor, Food Microbiology and Hygiene, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Konstantinos 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.