Masami Takeuchi

Dr Masami Takeuchi received a Ph.D. in food science and human nutrition from Washington State University, USA. After working in the area of nutrition for 7 years, she has been working in the area of food safety. In 2006, she joined the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome, Italy, to provide food safety scientific advice to Members as well as to the Codex Alimentarius Commission.

Her main responsibility lies on food safety risk assessment that deals with emerging issues, technologies and cross-cutting issues. These activities include safety assessment of food/feed derived from biotechnologies and other new technologies such as cell-based food production. She is the manager of the global database on safety assessment results of the foods derived from GMOs, entitled FAO GM Foods Platform (http://fao.org/gm-platform). Scientific Advice topics that she leads include food safety aspects of gene editing, cell-based food production, precision fermentation, modern food technologies and synthetic biology. She also advises FAO Members on the use and applications innovative technologies (i.e., whole genome sequencing, WGS) for better food safety management. Through the work on WGS, she advises Members to apply the WGS methodologies and approaches to detect pathogens including AMRs.

She has a field experience working at the regional office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok, Thailand for 4 years, thus while she takes up various normative global initiatives on food safety, she also assists countries and regions for their food safety capacity development. She has a field experience working at the regional office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok, Thailand for 4 years, thus while she takes up various normative global initiatives on food safety, she also assists countries and regions for their food safety capacity development.