Dr. Guodong Zhang is a senior research microbiologist at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in the FDA located in College Park, Maryland. He started his career as an assistant professor at The Northeast Agricultural University of China in 1989 after attaining his Ph.D. from The University. He was promoted to full professor in 1996. He went on to Purdue University in 1993 as a visiting associate professor and focused on soybean, wheat and corn genetics and breeding issues with the USDA. In 2000, he started to focus heavily on food microbiology and safety, first at the University of Georgia and US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, conducted research on poultry probiotics, prevention and control of pathogens in numerous foods, outbreak investigations, and internalization of foodborne pathogens in produce. In 2008, he moved to the FDA where his continued research focus includes cultural and molecular methods development and validation of procedures for the isolation, detection, and identification of foodborne pathogens from produce, seafood, eggs, and spices; prevalence of Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes and Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli in produce, spices, tree nuts, agricultural water, and composts; and whole genome sequencing for major foodborne pathogens.
Dr. Zhang is also involved in providing subject matter expertise for numerous regulatory documents and reviews and serves on several important FDA committees. He also reviews and advises on the development of key foods program policy efforts including participating in PC and produce rules. Besides publishing more than 100 research papers and book chapters and over 180 presentations, he has served as an editor and on editorial boards of several well-respected scientific journals including Journal of Food Protection, Journal of Applied Microbiology, and Letters in Applied Microbiology. He is actively involved in several professional organizations including AOAC, ASM, IAFP, ISO and sfam. He has developed official analytical methods for FDA and has been the recipient of a prestigious Incredible achievement award by The American Egg Board and numerous awards from the FDA. He remains the senior FDA subject matter expert for Salmonella, produce safety, shell eggs, and spices; and author and contact for several FDA Bacteriological Analytical Manual (BAM) chapters.
