Contaminants and Residues in Food

Paulo Augusto Da Costa Filho is a Chemist and joined Nestlè in 2003 as a Senior Research Scientist. For 21 years he has worked on developing analytical methods based on vibrational spectroscopy (near-infrared, mid-infrared and Raman spectroscopy) and allergen analysis. He is a scientific commitee member of AOAC, CEN and IDF.

Norbert Fuchsbauer has been working for HiPP since 2012, initially as head of the internal analysis laboratory and later in quality assurance, where he was responsible for the analysis and approval of raw materials. He is currently working as Food Safety Manager in the department of Product Regulatory and Product Compliance.

Peter Fürst retired as the Director from the CVUA-MEL (Chemical and Veterinary Analytical Institute Münsterland-Emscher-Lippe) in March 2019 and now works part-time at the University of Münster as a Honorary Professor. He joined the EFSA CONTAM Panel from 2006 to 2015 where he was Vice-Chair from 2012 to 2015. Since 2018 he has been a member of the EFSA FAF Panel.

Rüdiger Helling worked as Head of the Food Contact Materials and Consumer Goods Section at the Saxon State Laboratory for Public and Veterinary Health for 14 years and is member of several scientific advisory committees. In his current position as Head of Division at the Saxon State Ministry for Social Affairs and Cohesion he is responsible for the whole diversity of not only contaminants in food.

Christer Hogstrand is a Professor and Head of the Department of Analytica, Environmental and Forensic Sciences at King’s College London. Besides this role, he is an Expert for the EFSA and currently vice-chair of its Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain. He has been involved in numerous EFSA working groups and chaired working groups producing guidance documents on risk assessment of chemical mixtures.

Ron Hoogenboom is the Assistant Programme Leader Food Contaminants at Wageningen Food Safety Research, dealing with environmental contaminants, pesticides and toxins from moulds, algae and plants. Since 2012 he has been a member of the EFSA CONTAM Panel and was the vice-chair of the WG on PFAS.

Marc Lutz is a Food Chemist and the Head of SHE, Sustainability and Quality at Migros Industry (Migros Group) in Zurich. Currently he is working on the improvement of the work and food safety culture as well as developing standards for the various Migros production sites. He joined Migros Industry in 2020 to develop and manage the Center of Excellence Quality. From 2012 to 2020 he worked for Chocolat Frey AG and Delica AG as Head of Research & Development. He was a member of the management board and responsible for quality management, food safety, regulatory affairs, sustainability, product development and packaging engineering. Marc has been the President of the Chocosuisse commission \"Food Law Committee\" from 2012-2023.

Angelo Maggiore is a marine environmental scientist. Since 2014 he has been working as Scientific Officer at EFSA, now in the Knowledge, Innovation and Partnership Management Unit. He is coordinating EFSA’s environmental scanning and foresight projects including emerging chemicals, food and feed safety vulnerabilities in the circular and blue economy and climate change. He is coordinating the EFSA project on “Screening for emerging chemical risks in the food chain” and has supported the EFSA Scientific Committee in the development of the Guidance to develop specific protection goals for environmental risk assessment at EFSA, in relation to biodiversity and ecosystem services. In the past he has worked at ECHA in the field of environmental hazard classification. At the Italian Environmental Protection Agency, he has worked as environmental damage assessor, providing technical support to the Ministry of the Environment.

Rainer Malisch retired as the Head of the Dioxin Laboratory at the State Institute for Chemical and Veterinary Analysis of Food in Freiburg. He has been working as Head of the Reference Laboratory for determination of chlorinated and brominated POPs in human milk for the WHO/UNEP-coordinated exposure studies in the period 2000-2019 and as Director of the EU Reference Laboratory for Halogenated Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in Food and Feed since 2006.

Hans J.P. Marvin is a Biochemist and has been a Senior Scientist at Hayan group in the Netherlands since 2022. In 1991 he started as a Senior Scientist (biochemistry) at Centre for Plant Breeding and Reproduction Research (CPRO) in Wageningen, the Netherlands. In 1999, he moved to RIKILT Wageningen UR, now called Wageningen Food Safety Research (WFSR) and became a Senior Scientist specialised in many aspects of food safety, including analysis of foods, research on safety and risk assessment for authorities. He worked on a number of food safety issues, including emerging risk, big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), food/feed issues related to biotechnology and nanotechnology and risk analysis and initiated many activities within the Netherlands and EU in these fields. Hans’s personal research specialisms are (i) methods for early warning & emerging risk identification, (ii) application of a system approach to food safety and modelling, (iii) application of Bayesian Networks in prediction models for food safety and food fraud, iv) introduction of big data analytics in food safety research including big data infrastructure. On these topics he has organised and chaired numerous workshops and is author and co-author of over 125 peer-reviewed scientific publications.

Dieter Schrenk has been a Professor for Food Chemistry and Environmental Toxicology at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau since 1996. In 2005 he took on the full professorship for Food Chemistry and Toxicology. He joined the EFSA CONTAM Panel in 2003. Since 2018 he has been the Chair of this panel.

Tanja Schwerdtle is a Food Chemist and Toxicologist and has been a Full Professor for Food Chemistry at the University of Münster since 2008 and at the University of Potsdam’s Institute of Nutritional Science since 2013. Since March 2020 she has been the Vice President of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) in Berlin. She is a member of numerous scientific committees, such as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) Panel for Contaminants. Since 2021 she has been the Chair of the EFSA WG on arsenic in food.

Richard Stadler is the Head of the Institute for Food Safety & Analytical Science at Nestlé in Lausanne. Richard has held several research and quality management positions within Nestlé. He is also the Chairman of the FoodDrinkEurope contaminants expert group.

Michele Suman is the Head of the Food Safety & Authenticity Research Unit at Barilla, working in an international context on research projects within the field of food chemistry, food safety-quality-authenticity, food contact materials, sensing and mass spectrometry applications. He is the Chair of the Italian National Normative Organization (UNI) Food Authenticity Working Group, the Vicechair of the ILSI Food Contaminants Task Force and Coordinator of Quality-Food Safety Pillar - Italian National Cluster Agrifood Scientific Board. Finally, he is Adjunct Professor of AgriFood Authenticity at Catholic University Sacred Heart – Milan/Piacenza.

Veerle Vanheusden is a Policy Officer in DG SANTE of the European Commission. She joined the European Commission in 2013, where she worked for four years in the Unit “Pesticides and Biocides”. In 2017 she moved to the Unit dealing with food processing technologies and novel foods, where her main area of activity is the EU policy and legislation on contaminants. She has previously worked in the private pharmaceutical sector.

Frans Verstraete works in the European Commission in the Direction General SANTE and is responsible for legislation on contaminants.