EVENTS

Date:	Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Time:	1:30 PM -- 4:00 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

Speaker biographies

David W. K. Acheson is the managing director for food and import safety at Leavitt Partners LLC, a consulting firm with offices in Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C. Previously, he was the associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where he was responsible for all agency-wide food and feed issues, including health promotion and nutrition. Mr. Acheson has also been the chief medical officer at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. He has published extensively and is internationally recognized both for his public health expertise in food safety and his research in infectious diseases. While an associate professor at Tufts University, he also undertook basic molecular pathogenesis research on foodborne pathogens, especially Shiga toxin-producing E. coli.

Walter K. Olson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and author and commentator on American law and regulation. His books include The Litigation Explosion (Penguin Books, 1991), The Excuse Factory (Free Press, 1997), and The Rule of Lawyers (Truman Talley Books/St. Martin's, 2003). Over the past year, he has extensively criticized the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 on his website OverLawyered.com, which is widely cited as the oldest blog on law. Before joining the Manhattan Institute in 1985, Mr. Olson spent four years at AEI with the magazine Regulation, where he worked with the magazine's editors Antonin Scalia and the late Anne Brunsdale.

Carol L. Tucker Foreman, Distinguished Fellow in Food Policy at the Consumer Federation of America, has had a major influence on food policy in the United States over the past thirty years and has advised several presidential administrations. As assistant secretary of agriculture for food and consumer services during the Carter administration, she was responsible for the United States Department of Agriculture's food assistance and food safety programs, led the successful campaign to pass food stamp reform legislation, and was responsible for publishing the first Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Ms. Tucker Foreman's other accomplishments include founding the Safe Food Coalition, persuading Congress to approve a new program that encourages creation of new locally-based meat processing companies, and supporting efforts to adopt the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points meat and poultry inspection system. She has also served on the U.S. Agricultural Policy Advisory Committee for Trade and been appointed to the President's Commission on White House Fellowships and the U.S.-EU Consultative Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology. President Carter nominated her as a director of the National Consumer Cooperative Bank and of the Commodity Credit Corporation. From 1982 to 1999, Tucker Foreman was president of the public policy consulting firm Foreman Heidepriem & Mager, Inc.

Michelle R. Worosz is assistant professor in the department of agricultural economics and rural sociology at Auburn University. Ms. Worosz's work has focused on pesticide use and the Food Quality Protection Act; examination of commodity systems including the creation, use, and contestation over grades, standards, and notions of quality; and agrifood governance as a whole. In her current work, Ms. Worosz examines the nature of contestation over the meaning of "food safety" and the associated development, interpretation, implementation, surveillance, and enforcement of food safety statutes and regulations. Much of this work focuses on the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Wholesome Meat Act, as well as the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points regulation and the associated notices and directives. She has also conducted research on consumer perceptions of the food safety system, including various actors within the food safety system; food safety regulatory barriers for producers and processors attempting to enter into the alternative red meat sector; the statutory and regulatory barriers to marketing small-scale beef production and processing; and the framing of the debates surrounding recent high-profile recalls, including leafy greens and beef. Prior to joining Auburn University, Ms.Worosz spent several years at the Food Safety Policy Center at Michigan State University, where she was also affiliated with the Institute for Food Laws and Regulations.