NCFST Honors Founders at 20th Anniversary Gala

From left: NCFST founders Fred Shank, Karen Carson and Darsh Wasan display their recognition plaques aboard the cruise boat Odyssey, the site of the NCFST 20th Anniversary Gala.

SUMMIT-ARGO, Ill. — The National Center for Food Safety and Technology (NCFST), Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), sailed toward the future while celebrating the past at its 20th Anniversary Gala held aboard the luxury vessel Odyssey on Lake Michigan in Chicago Oct. 16. The evening dinner-dance event, held during NCFST’s Annual Meeting, was attended by nearly 150 center members, staff and guests.

This year, NCFST, the nation’s first consortium of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an academic institution and the food industry, marks two decades of food safety science and technology excellence.

The gala event featured an award presentation to the center’s three founders, who received recognition plaques acknowledging their accomplishment during the evening cruise.

“Tonight, NCFST is pleased to honor the work of Darsh Wasan, Karen Carson and Fred Shank, each of whom played a key role in the creation of the center, the nation’s pioneer collaborative research consortium of FDA, IIT and the food industry,” said Martin A. Cole, Ph.D., director of NCFST. “These plaques are a token of our staff and stakeholders’ esteem, recognizing these three thought leaders’ dedication to advancing food safety science and technology to improve the public health through one big idea and many hours of development and planning.”

The NCFST Founders Awards were presented to:

• Darsh Wasan, Ph.D., IIT vice president, office of international affairs, and professor of chemical engineering, who was honored for his leadership in the conception and formation of NCFST, which has become a model for cooperation among academia, industry and governments. Wasan’s dedication to realizing the potential of the center included drafting the initial proposal in response to FDA’s invitation for solicitation from a hospital bed where he was recovering from surgery, and later taking many long road trips with co-creator Fred Shank to solicit membership and funding from food manufacturing companies who would benefit from NCFST’s food safety research and fast-track technology commercialization to reduce risk to consumers.
  
• NCFST’s first project officer Karen Carson, former deputy director of FDA’s Office of Plant and Dairy Foods and Beverages, was recognized for her work in the planning and development of the CFSAN-NCST-IIT partnership and collaborative research model. Now retired after more than 30 years with the agency, Carson served as the FDA CFSAN principal investigator for all Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADA) with NCFST since its inception, applying her broad-based expertise in food safety and food-related public health issues to help steer the center’s research priorities.
  
• Fred R. Shank, Ph.D., former director of the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) from 1989-1998, was recognized for his support and endorsement of FDA’s entry into the cooperative agreement to establish NCFST as the nation’s first research center where scientists from government, academia and industry work together collaboratively to advance food safety. He was instrumental in guiding the consortium’s scientific endeavors to ensure that FDA scientists had access to highly technical expertise and the opportunity to conduct critical food safety research that could not have been attained by FDA alone.