Illinois Tech’s Institute for Food Safety and Health (IFSH) hosted a special webinar on “Workplace Safety Considerations During an Emergent Infectious Disease” on April 23.

The online seminar is available here on-demand, and features a behind the scenes walk-through of the decision-making and strategies used in developing new safety guidelines for re-opening IFSH labs for critical work during a novel viral pandemic.

Featured Speakers

Deena Awad, Senior Support Scientist, Microbiology, IFSH

Awad has a degree in Food Science with a focus on Food Microbiology from Michigan State University, where she worked in aflatoxin research as an undergraduate. She comes to the Illinois Tech side of IFSH after almost five years with FDA as an ORISE Fellow focusing on leafy greens and sprouts safety research. In her free time, Deena works with shelter dogs and runs the Big Dog Program for a Chicago-area dog rescue.

Yun Wang, Ph.D., Senior Scientist/Biosafety officer, IFSH

Yun Wang is currently a Senior Scientist and Biosafety Officer at the Institute for Food Safety and Health. She was a Research Biochemist at U.S. Food and Drug Administration from 2013 to 2019. She received her Ph.D. in Biosystems Engineering from the Michigan State University in 2014. The major goal of her research is to ensure public health through novel detection and diagnosis approaches. Her research mainly focuses on pathogen and toxin detection, rapid disease diagnosis, and genetic study of food-borne pathogens.