Jim Hungerford has been lucky enough to work with some very inspiring scientists, starting with his time at Western Washington University where he changed his major to chemistry from biology after three years, earning a BS and MS in Chemistry working with Dr. Gary M Lampman on organometallics. His doctorate work at the University of Washington opened opportunities to work in analytical chemistry with Dr. Gary Christian, Dr. Calvin Giddings of HPLC theory and field-flow fractionation, Dr. Jaromir Ruzicka the inventor of flow injection analysis, and, for a brief time, Dr. Tomas Hirschfeld of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. After a brief post-doc working on in-situ detection of food tampering, Jim was hired by FDA’s Seafood Products Research Center (SPRC). At SPRC (later renamed) his work included automated methods and rapid tests for histamine in fish, development and validation of methods for marine toxins. He is most proud of his collaboration with Dr. Ronald Manger on a cell culture-based method for ciguatoxins (CTXs) in fish which, after 30 years, is still the benchmark method for CTXs. Presently Jim has a position as a Research Coordinator in FDA’s new Office of Scientific Coordination and Computing Sciences (OSCCS). As part of FDA’s new Human Foods Program, he splits his time at FDA between OSCCS and his own research into onsite histamine testing. He has served with IUPAC, Codex working groups, for several years as a US-Japan joint panel on toxic microorganisms and then as an expert on ciguatoxins for FAO/WHO.
Jim has been doing volunteer work for AOAC INTERNATIONAL for many years, first serving as an expert resource as General Referee on Marine Toxins and also Seafood Products. That led to him founding the AOAC Task Force on Marine and Freshwater Toxins (later co-chaired with Professor Ana Gago-Martinez) to accelerate OMAs for mouse bioassay replacement in the detection of paralytic shellfish toxins. The group he assembled also worked with the Washington State DOH to offer in-laboratory training courses on marine toxin OMAs and rapid test kits. Jim also reviews for JAOAC, the PTM program, and co-edited a guest editor issue for JAOAC on marine toxins. He has previously served on the AOAC Editorial Board, which he is very happy to rejoin.
