The Next Frontier of Environmental Monitoring: Tracking & Tools

Celina To is the Segment Marketing Manager, Food at Oxford Nanopore Technologies. In her role, she has been working closely with the commercial and marketing team in supporting the food industry on the implementation of genomic solutions for food safety and quality. She graduated from Purdue University with a M.S. in Food Microbiology and California Polytechnical State University with a B.S. in Food Science. Celina has held a variety of positions throughout her career including research assistant at NASA Johnson Space Center and Hilmar Cheese Company, quality assurance supervisor at Safeway-Albertsons, and technical support/sales manager at Hygiena LLC. She continues to be an active member at multiple food industry associations, some of which are planning and microbiology committees, to support the exchange of new knowledge and best practices in emerging issues in food safety.

David Legan is Director of Science for Eurofins Microbiology. Formally affiliated with the lab microbiology in Madison, WI, he works across the US network of labs on all aspects of method selection, development, validation, and verification. In previous roles he spent time within Kraft Foods and Nabisco working on preservation systems, food safety and pathogen modeling. He began his career at Campden BRI in the UK working on all aspects of bakery microbiology. He holds a PhD from the University of Reading in the UK.

In 2000, Steve Brazeel founded SunTerra Produce, which has grown from a one-person produce brokerage firm into an industry-leading, full-service platform handling sales, marketing, farming, food safety, harvesting, storage, and distribution activities for specialty crop producers on over 10,000 acres throughout the US and Mexico. Born out of SunTerra‘s participation in the USDA’s ground-breaking Farmers to Families Food Box program, Project FoodBox was launched in 2020. Since the program’s inception, the SunTerra/Project FoodBox teams have delivered over 85 Million pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables to communities in need through its network of food banks, community organizations, and health care plans.

Elevated Foods, founded by Mr. Brazeel in 2020, was recently awarded a $20M grant as part of USDA’s Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities program. Elevated was formed to bring more profit to farmers by incentivizing the adoption of new technologies & practices and providing technical support to help make them more efficient and resilient.