Administration/Faculty

Drs. Daniel Trachewsky and Wesley R. Long administer the JIFSAN Food Safety Risk Analysis Professional Development Training Program.

Daniel Trachewsky is the Education and Outreach Liaison assigned to the FDA JIFSAN liaison staff. Previously, he was the Director for Curriculum Development at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Staff College and professor in the colleges of medicine of several U.S. and Canadian universities.

Wesley R. Long is the Risk Analysis and Extramural Liaison assigned to the FDA JIFSAN Liaison Staff. He was the founding chair of the U.S. Federal Interagency Risk Assessment Consortium (RAC), comprised of 20 federal agencies and organizations that have food safety risk analysis responsibilities.

Faculty for Core and Intermediate Courses

Amber Jessup joined the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1999 after completing her doctorate in economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Jessup is primarily involved in analyzing benefits and costs of proposed rules and regulations and providing economic support for others in CFSAN. Her areas of interest include biotechnology, labeling, and methods for measuring morbidity.

Bernadene Magnuson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Magnuson teaches courses in nutrition, food toxicology and cancer prevention. She has published over 20 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters. Prior to coming to Maryland, Dr. Magnuson was a food toxicology extension specialist at the University of Idaho. Dr.Magnuson is the Past-Chair for the Toxicology and Safety Evaluation Division of the Institute of Food Technology.

Katherine A. McComas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her research focuses on scientific, environmental, and risk communication, as well as what it means to be "effective" or "successful" in public participation. Dr. McComas is particularly interested in public participation related to collective deliberation about health or environmental risks, and much of her research focuses on the use of public meetings as methods of participation. Recent work has also focused on communication related to conflicts of interest in science.

Tigran A. Melkonyan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Melkonyan earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics at the Yerevan State University (Armenia) and Ph.D. in Economics at the Iowa State University. His research interests are in the areas of the economics of food safety and biotechnology, agricultural contracts, decision theory, game theory and international trade. Dr. Melkonyan has published his work in prestigious economics journals including Economic Theory, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Review of International Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and Journal of Regional Science.

Angela Ritzert earned her doctoral degree in Economics from the University of Kentucky.  Dr. Ritzert worked for the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the U.S. Senate under the leadership of Florida Senator Connie Mack.  Following the Senator's retirement, Angela began working as a regulatory economist for the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.  Her main duties as a CFSAN regulatory economist are to determine the costs and benefits of food safety regulations. In her time at CFSAN Angela has worked on economic issues relating to peer review, retail food safety, food bioterrorism, foodborne illness, and transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.

Beverly R. Silverberg is President of Beverly R. Silverberg Communications, Inc. and has over 30 years of communication experience. She consults and lectures extensively on media and communication issues and provides risk communication training. For a decade she was the spokesperson for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Her special expertise is in efficient and effective crisis communications.

Monique Mitchell Turner is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland at College Park. Dr. Turner studies risk and health communication messages; particularly, the role that emotion and cognition play in how people respond to risk messages. Her most recent studies examine the impact of guilt, anxiety, and anger on processing health related messages. Currently, Dr. Turner is working on developing a theory that explains the conditions of emotion-based messages: when they are persuasive, to whom, and why. Dr. Turner is a National Network Trainer for CDCynergy, an overall methodology for health communication planning and implementation. She is an expert in experimental, survey, and interview techniques as well as in univariate and multivariate statistics. Her research appears in such journals as Communication Monographs, Communication Studies, and Communication Research Reports. She conducts preconference risk communication training for the U.S. National Communication Association, is the Associate Editor for Communication Research Reports, and has served on the editorial boards for The Journal of Applied Communication, and Communication Reports.

Richard A.Williams, Jr. is an Economist who directs the Division of Market Studies in CFSAN at the FDA. Dr. Williams has been involved in risk analysis for over 20 years and was instrumental, with USDA, in designing the Introduction to Risk Assessment course now being taught by JIFSAN. He is an original member of the Society for Risk Analysis and has published papers and given talks in the areas of risk assessment, risk management and risk transfers. He has written and directed risk assessments and cost–benefit analyses, taught classes in both and is an advisory member to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

Charles Yoe is a Professor of Economics at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. Dr. Yoe helped to develop and has taught courses in risk assessment and risk management for several agencies of the U.S. government in a wide variety of risk analysis applications. He has been involved in numerous international education activities for the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), FAO/WHO, USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) and other organizations, and is the recipient of the 2004 FDA Director's Special Citation for his role in developing the JIFSAN Professional Development Training Program