Lou inspects henhouses 10/00
Although she spends most of her time doing research and paperwork, occasionally the FDA thinks it would be wise for her to see what the inspectors do for fun, and they send her on a field trip to an egg farm that is suspected of having been involved in a salmonella outbreak. Here's a picture of her and her crew on an inspection tour in Denver over Halloween 2000. We are not sure which is Lou.
Lou is appointed editor - Fall 1999
Lou has recently been appointed editor of Food Microbiology magazine, a bimonthly journal. The first issue under her byline came out in February 2000. For more info: http://www.academicpress.com/foodmicro
Lou is appointed Branch Chief
From a press release by Illinois Institute of Technology on April 11, 2006:
Mary Lou Tortorello, Ph.D. has been appointed as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) new chief of Food Technology Branch/Division of Food Processing and Packaging at the National Center for Food Safety and Technology (NCFST). Tortorello has been with the FDA at the Moffett Campus of the NCFST since 1991.
"Lou's solid technical background and pleasant but firm personality gives us vital leadership that will be essential to our cooperative research program as we continue addressing emerging food safety issues," said Richard McDonald, Ph.D., director of Food Processing and Packaging, Center for Food Safety and Nutrition, NCFST.
Tortorello served as the principal investigator on several NCFST collaborative research projects including the development of rapid detection methods for microbial survival, survival and behavior of biothreat agents in foods, and the survival and recovery of Listeria monocytogenes in foods and food processing environments. She is currently the Laboratory Quality Assurance chair and the Microbiology Platform coordinator at the NCFST. She serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Food Protection and is the chief editor of Food Microbiology.
She received her Ph.D. in Microbiology from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., her M.S. in Biological Sciences from Loyola University, Chicago, and her B.S. in Biological Sciences from Northern Illinois University at DeKalb.
