9^th International Symposium on

Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, Great Britain

Prof. Chris Elliott is currently Professor of Food Safety and Director of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published around 300 peer review articles, many of them relating to the detection and control of agriculture, food and environmental related contaminants. His main research interests are in the development of innovative techniques to provide early warning of toxin threats across the agri- food chains. Protecting the integrity of the food supply chain from fraud is also a key research topic and Chris led the independent review of Britain’s food system following the 2013 horsemeat scandal. Over the years Chris has developed a high level network of collaborators across Europe, the United States and Asia. He co-ordinates and participates in multiple European framework research projects. He is a founding member of the International School for Advanced Residue Analysis in Food based in France. He is also a visiting Professor at the China Agriculture University in Beijing, a recipient of a Winston Churchill Fellowship and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Royal Society of Biology and the Institute of Food Science and Technology.

University of Parma, Italy

Prof. Chiara Dall'Asta is Associate Professor in Food Chemistry, Department of Food and Drug, University of Parma. Her research activity is mainly focused on toxic/bioactive compounds in food and their mechanism of action. In particular, she is among the leading scientists in the field of modified mycotoxins, addressing in particular their formation in plants, their stability along the food processing chain, and their toxicological relevance. Recently, she's moved towards the application of metabolomics and lipidomics for studying the interaction between biological systems. She has been member of 3 Working Group of the European Food Safety Authority, being co-author of 8 scientific opinions. She is author of more than 135 full paper articles.

LABERCA - ONIRIS, Nantes, France

He is currently the Head and the Scientific Director of this laboratory. Besides, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology and Pharmacology of the National Veterinary School. His main teaching area is linked to analytical chemistry and food safety. He participated to the conception and the construction of SARAF, a continuous education school dedicated to residue control in food. Moreover he acts as an independent advisor for the United Nations joint FAO/IAEA organisation on the subject of monitoring residues in food products. He is a technical auditor in the French Accreditation Body (COFRAC) and expert in the French Agency for Food Safety (AFSSA). He was invited by the Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) to participate in several inspection missions dedicated to the control of member states and third countries residue monitoring plan. He is the author or co-author of 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications, 3 book chapters, 40 oral communications and 45 posters. Recently, Bruno Le Bizec received an award for his work on steroid hormones at the Euroresidue V conference held in the Netherlands in May 2004.

University of Applied Science Fresenius · Institute for Analytical Research, Idstein, Germany

Thomas P. Knepper is Vice President for Research at the University of Applied Sciences Fresenius in Idstein, Germany and professor for analytical chemistry; his expertise is in the analysis and fate of polar pollutants.

University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

My scientific focus areas are plant nutrition, food quality, analytical chemistry and chemometrics. I have contributed to several studies aimed at unravelling the functional roles of nutrients in plant metabolism. I have also utilized my background in fundamental plant science for investigating the quality and authenticity of plant based food products. In these studies analytical methods have been developed for authenticating the geographical and agricultural origin of plants.

I have extensive experience with development of analytical methods for multi-element and stable isotope analysis of biological material. During the past decade I have gained major experience with ICP-OES, ICP-MS and IR-MS (also compound-specific IR-MS) and some experience with HPLC and MC-ICP-MS. I am a skilled user of various chemometric tools for multivariate data analysis. I have major experience with planning, conducting and evaluating rigidly controlled plant experiments under field conditions, in greenhouses and climate chambers.

Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), Rome, Italy

Dr. Claudia Zoani is Researcher at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic (ENEA). Graduated in Chemistry, with a PhD in Analytical Chemistry at the University “La Sapienza” of Rome, she concluded the courses & research activities of a second PhD in Agriculture, Food and Environment at the University of Pisa. Specialist on atomic spectroscopic and mass spectrometry techniques and Metrology, she conducts R&D activities on Reference Materials and Methods; measurement uncertainty; food quality, safety, traceability and authenticity; chemical risk assessment. She has been involved in various European and National Funded Project relevant for food safety & metrology in food and nutrition. Member of the Eurachem Working Group on Reference Material and Member of the Technical Scientific Committee of the public-private jointly owned consortium Ce.R.T.A. (Regional Centers for Alimentary Technology). Author/co-author of more than 100 publications (papers, book chapters, contributions at national and international conferences, etc.); section editor for ACTA IMEKO journal and scientific reviewer of many Journals and National and International Conferences, she is Member of the Steering Committee of the IMEKOFOODS International Conference series. Awarded with the Premio Leonardo UGIS for “research and its communication” (IV Edition 2014). She is Coordinator of the Research Infrastructure METROFOOD-RI (ESFRI Domain Health & Food).

Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Jeroen Jansen received his M.Sc. degree in chemistry and chemical engineering from the Universiteit van Amsterdam in 2001, with an industrial project in chemometrics for the food industry, where he studied predictive quality control of dietary fats by HPLC to precede time-consuming crystallization studies. His scientific studies focused on estimating stoichiometry and kinetics of a batch reaction from UV/vis data with the ‘Tendency Modelling' approach. His ventures into biology started with his Ph.D. project in developing data analysis methodology for metabolomics studies. During this project he developed the Analysis of Variance-Simultaneous Component Analysis approach, which is now a strongly emerging and developing method for data analysis of dynamic experiments, both in- and outside of metabolomics. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 2005 from the Process Analysis and Chemometrics group at the Universiteit of Amsterdam of Prof. Age Smilde, Dr. Jansen took his chemometric and metabolomics expertise for a Post-Doctoral research position to the Netherlands Institute for Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). There, with Prof. Wim van der Putten and Dr. Nicole van Dam-who now heads the Ecogenomics group at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen-he applied metabolomic techniques to the study of multitrophic interactions between plants and insects. This also required considerable chemometric innovation, specifically in integrating biological concepts into chemometrics as well as developing new biological concepts, like the ‘metabolic interface', which are available for modelling.

Dr. Jansen then in 2009 went for a second Post-Doctoral position to the Netherlands Metabolomics Centre (again with Prof. Smilde) where he applied Individual Differences Scaling, a PCA-like method from management science, to metabolomics data. Such individual differences are crucial to integrate the study of metabolic networks with component analysis, through the ‘Between-Metabolite Relationships' he defined. However, they will prove to be of specific use in the strongly emerging field of Personalized Health, which floats on these very individual differences to tailor-make treatments.

In 2011 he was offered the Assistant Professorship at the Chemometrics group of the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, where he further focuses on integrating biological and industrial concepts with multivariate data analysis to obtain more information-rich and dedicated chemometric models. He now takes a broader view, including industrial spectroscopic and other ‘omics' data.

Wageningen Food Safety Research (WFSR), part of Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands

Prof. Michel Nielen is principal scientist at RIKILT, scientific director of TI-COAST, the Dutch public-private partnership on Analytical Science & Technology, and professor of analytical chemistry at Wageningen University. He obtained his doctorate in analytical chemistry at the Free University of Amsterdam. He is co-founder and co-chairman of the symposium series on Recent Advances in Food Analysis (RAFA). He is (co )author of more than 170 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters.

University of Antwerp, Belgium

Prof. Dr. Adrian COVACI is currently a Professor of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is the current director of the Toxicological Center in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. After he has acquired a PhD in Chemistry in 2002, he became a full professor in 2012.
Current fields of interest are the “Application of advanced mass spectrometric techniques to the human biomonitoring and exposome” and “Metabolomics and human metabolism of xenobiotics in in vitro and in vivo systems”. He has co-authored more than 530 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has an H-index of 77. His papers have been cited more than 22,000 times which has earned him the title of Highly Cited Researcher (2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018).
Since 2011, he is the Belgian representative in the Division of Chemistry in the Environment of the European Association for Chemical and Molecular Science (EuCheMS). He is also co-Editor-in-Chief for Environment International (IF2017: 7.29) and an Associate Editor for Science of the Total Environment (IF2017: 4.80).

European Commission, Directorate General for Health and Consumers, Brussels, Belgium

Frans Verstraete graduated in 1985 as agricultural engineer at the University of Ghent (Belgium). After his studies he held positions at the University of Ghent and thereafter at the Belgian Ministry of Agriculture and he was for a period technical adviser of the Belgian Minister of Agriculture. He is working for the European Commission since 1997. In the European Commission he has had various functions but since 2000 he is working at the Directorate General Health and Consumers in the Chemicals, contaminants and pesticides unit. He is responsible for the elaboration, development and management of the EU-legislation concerning certain contaminants in feed and food.

European Commission's Joint Research Centre, Geel, Belgium

Professor Hendrik Emons is currently Head of the Unit 'Food & Feed Compliance' of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) located both in Geel (Belgium) and Ispra (Italy). He studied chemistry, gained a PhD in 1984 and a Habilitation (DSc) in 1988. He was Docent for Analytical Chemistry at the University of Leipzig (Germany), Visiting Faculty at the University of Cincinnati, OH, USA, afterwards in charge of the German Environmental Specimen Banking Project at the Research Centre Jülich (Germany), and later Deputy Head of the Institute for Phytosphere Research there. He joined the European Commission in 2003 leading the development, production and distribution of reference materials at the JRC. Since July 2016 he is in charge of a unit mandated with the harmonisation of the implementation of EU food and feed legislation and the management of the European Union Reference Laboratories for genetically modified organisms, food contact materials and feed additives. In addition to his duties at the JRC, he is teaching at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, is serving as member of various international scientific and publishing boards and has published more than 250 scientific publications.

Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Christian W. Klampfl obtained his Ph.D. from University of Innsbruck/Austria in 1993. Since 1992 he is holding a position at the institute of Analytical Chemistry of Johannes-Kepler University in Linz first as an assistant-, since 2001 as an associate professor. His main interest is the hyphenation of separation techniques (mainly capillary electrophoresis) with mass spectrometry. Since 2008 he has been the editor of six Special Issues of Electrophoresis and Journal of Chromatography A devoted to this topic. Recently he developed increased interest in ambient ionization mass spectrometry, particularly for DART, DESI and direct ionization techniques such as direct MS from thin-layer chromatography plates. He has published more than 100 research papers and seven book chapters, covering a wide field of analytical chemistry applications - from the analysis of pharmaceuticals and food related materials to environmental and plant related topics and finally the characterization of technical products such as synthetic polymers. Currently Prof. Klampfl is acting as deputy head of the Institute of Analytical Chemistry and as vice-head of the academic senate of Johannes Kepler University Linz.