Food Authenticity Seminar Series: Fighting Food Fraud with Data

The adulteration of food for economic gain is a global phenomenon and rising in severity due to the globalization of the world’s supply chain and the economic crisis caused by the invasion of Ukraine. A growing number of scientific weapons are being developed, validated, and implemented to detect and deter fraud. These include remote testing capabilities, untargeted analytical techniques, and the application of artificial intelligence to help interpret scientific data and produce predictive models of where fraud is most likely to occur. This seminar will give an overview of the work being undertaken at Queen’s University Belfast on the capture and exploitation of data to fight food fraud, and outline opportunities to collaborate.

The Virtual Seminar Series on Food Authenticity is organized by researchers and students at McGill and the University of Guelph.

The event is virtual and will take place over Zoom.

About the Speaker

Dr. Christopher Elliott

Dr. Christopher Elliott is a professor of food safety and founder of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast. He is also a professor of food security at Thamassat University and Co-founder of the International Joint Research Center on Food Security, based in Thailand. He has published more than 550 peer reviewed articles on food safety and authenticity. Protecting the integrity of the food supply chain from fraud is a key topic of his research and Dr. Elliott led the independent review of Britain’s food system following the 2013 horsemeat scandal. He is a visiting professor at the China Agriculture University, a recipient of a Winston Churchill Fellowship and is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Royal Society of Biology. In 2017, Dr. Elliott was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Theophilus Redwood Prize and was awarded an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II. He was elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2020.