Date
Meeting Overview
Presentation from Thomas Burke on Food Traceability. Thomas is the Food Traceability and Safety Scientist at IFT’s Global Food Traceability Center (GFTC). Currently, he is the technical lead for interoperability piloting, implementation guidance, and beta testing for the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability, an initiative funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The Global Dialogue is a business-to-business framework facilitating the creation of data and IT architecture standards addressing traceability use cases in the seafood sector, such as catch legality, food safety, and labor accountability. Burke also researches emerging technologies, protocols, and related processes pertaining to food traceability systems, namely blockchain, data capture integration, open source interoperability tools, and artificial intelligence. At GFTC, he has led the creation of the food traceability course entitled “Demystifying Traceability” as well as developing and conducting interactive, standards-based traceability workshops for the food industry community. He previously worked as a Food Safety Analyst at the Georgia Department of Agriculture, working on food outbreak investigations, emergency response, regulatory policy, and informatics. He has a Bachelor of Science in microbiology from Kansas State University and is an MPH graduate in residence in epidemiology at Emory University.
