Jaykus receives NSF food safety award
NSF International presented Lee-Ann Jaykus, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor, Food Science, at North Carolina State University, with its 2017 NSF Food Safety Leadership Award for Innovation.
NSF International presented Lee-Ann Jaykus, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor, Food Science, at North Carolina State University, with its 2017 NSF Food Safety Leadership Award for Innovation. NSF International’s Food Safety Leadership Awards recognize individuals and organizations for real and lasting improvements in food safety.
An IFT member, Jaykus has more than 30 years’ experience advancing the science of food safety through applied infection prevention and control science, especially regarding norovirus. She has collaborated on many large, multi-institutional projects on foodborne pathogens and food virology, including developing methods to detect human enteric virus contamination in foods and environmental samples, and better understanding the dynamics of virus transmission through the food chain. She serves as the scientific director of the USDA-NIFA Food Virology Collaborative (NoroCORE), a team of 30-plus scientists representing 18 academic and government institutions working to develop improved tools, skills, and capacity to understand and control foodborne virus disease risks.
Under Dr. Jaykus’s direction, NoroCORE cultivated human norovirus, which had eluded scientists for 50 years; developed a risk-modeling program for tracking norovirus that can calculate disease risk and screen strategies for managing contamination in foodservice and healthcare facilities; confirmed that alcohol-based hand sanitizers cannot completely inactivate norovirus; and worked to modify FDA Food Code recommendations to facilitate norovirus control.
“I have never met a scientist or food safety professional as enthusiastic and competent as Dr. Jaykus is in defining the issues, developing key needs, initiating the means to fill gaps, and translating findings quickly into industry applications,” says Hal King, president and CEO of Public Health Innovations. “Her work will lead to improved methods to prevent norovirus foodborne disease infections around the world, and she has elevated our nation’s food safety competencies across all sectors of the food chain.”