IPIA Faculty Spotlight | Haley Oliver

Food Science professor Haley Oliver leads $10 million Food Safety project

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded Purdue a $10 million grant to establish the Feed the Future Food Safety Innovation Lab (FSIL). The FSIL will be directed by Haley Oliver, an associate professor of food science, and will collaborate with a group of Purdue and Cornell University researchers to develop programs to improve food safety in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Senegal.

"The 'lab' itself isn't necessarily laboratory infrastructure, as you might think," says Oliver, "but rather a larger and more comprehensive effort to help people understand important aspects of food safety and how to achieve it, so that they can actually demand or request safer foods. Ultimately, this puts pressure on bigger systems like food processing to deliver those safe foods. We can have nutritious food, we can have enough of it, and it can get to the populations that need it; but if it's not safe, we've lost our food security."

Purdue President Mitch Daniels was present for the beginning of the announcement and called it a "big day for Purdue." Feeding the world sustainably is a key theme for Purdue University's College of Agriculture.

The Food Safety Innovation Lab focuses on:

• improving awareness of the need for food safety measures
• supporting local research on food safety issues
• building policy and engagement efforts to disseminate information about food safety research
• developing best practices that can be used by households, communities and commercial stakeholders

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