Food Protection Trends

COMMENTARY from the Executive Director
June 2008

“ The IAFP Foundation helps further IAFP’s mission around the world ”
By David W. Tharp, IAFP Executive Director

Have you contributed to the IAFP Foundation recently? If you have, you are joined with more than 650 IAFP Members who contribute to the Foundation regularly and help to support many worthwhile projects. If you have not contributed recently, please read on to see what the Foundation does for IAFP!

The IAFP Foundation provides funding or full-support for many IAFP projects throughout the year. To simply provide a list would not be enough to inform you of how valuable the Foundation is to IAFP. Allow me to describe some of the programs supported by IAFP’s Foundation. Let’s start with how the Foundation helps promote student involvement in IAFP. The Foundation supports student activities through the Developing Scientist Competition at the Annual Meeting and by providing Travel Scholarships for students from North America and around the world.

The Developing Scientist Competition recognizes outstanding student presentations, both oral and poster, that take place at IAFP’s Annual Meeting. Each year, there are between 70 and 90 students competing in this event. Ten students giving oral presentations and ten students with poster presentations are chosen as finalists. From these, three are selected through a judging process to be recognized in first, second and third places. A review of our past winners dating back to 1986 reveals many of today’s IAFP leaders. Now how valuable can this program be? I think you can tell; its value is very great!

Our Student Travel Scholarship program began in 2005 with only two students receiving this support. For 2008, six students will receive travel scholarships bringing our total to seventeen students supported through this program. Of these 17, fifteen are still IAFP Members and two are now employed in food science positions. Of the six students coming to IAFP 2008, four of them are from outside of North America (one each from Korea, Australia, Ethiopia and Sweden). We are so very fortunate to have these students attend our Annual Meeting. It is exciting to see the enthusiasm in our scholarship winner’s eyes when they have the opportunity to meet our active IAFP Members in person at the Annual Meeting. This is truly a life-changing opportunity for those selected to receive this honor.

Another very worthwhile project supported by the IAFP Foundation is our shipment of excess journals to scientists in developing countries through the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Each year, we send complete volumes of both the Journal of Food Protection and Food Protection Trends directly to FAO in Rome, Italy. FAO then distributes through their network, to those scientists in need of this research information. These scientists are grateful to receive this information which they would not be able to otherwise obtain. This is truly a small investment made by the IAFP Foundation to help provide food safety information to those in need.

The IAFP Foundation also supports the Audiovisual Library containing more than 90 video tape and DVD titles. This information can be used by IAFP Members at no cost to the user. Simply “check it out” of the Library for a two-week period, then pay to return the material to IAFP. Our Audio-visual Library provides Members a very economical method to obtain training materials on a wide range of subjects.

IAFP’s Foundation has spon-sored the Ivan Parkin Lecture at the Annual Meeting each year since 1986. In 2004, the John H. Silliker Lecture began and has been supported by the Foundation through an annual contribution from Silliker, Inc. In addition to these prestigious lectures, the Foundation has been instrumental in supporting the IAFP European Symposium, our Rapid Response Symposium and the Timely Topics Symposium. This has allowed IAFP to offer more to our Members each and every year without having to charge higher registration rates.

For each of these projects, you can quickly see the value that the IAFP Foundation provides for the organization. Whether it is supporting student activities, providing Member training through lectures or symposia or supplying scientists in need with information, the IAFP Foundation helps further IAFP’s mission, around the world. Without the Foundation’s support, these worthwhile projects would not be possible.

Please consider a financial contribution to IAFP’s Foundation today!