Rethink College Park

The Gazette is reporting on a new 5,000 square foot Food Safety lab to be in place in the Patapsco building by July of 2011. This is a  joint venture with the Waters Corp. and the University.  The Patapsco location is ideal for a lab such as this since it is directly next to the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition building.  Scientists will attend two-week training sessions at the new lab which will be called the International Food Safety Training Laboratory (IFSTL).

About 200 foreign scientists will be taught there annually by members of the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, a collaborative program between the university and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The lab will have a staff of five full-time workers.

The $4 million investment from Waters will build and equip lab as well as help design the program. Waters is a manufacturer of food safety equipment and its investment is crucial to the success of the project.

“Exporting lab-based food safety expertise to other parts of the world will help protect the health of U.S. citizens, as well as people in other countries.  Moreover, bringing hundreds of trainees to Maryland helps support our regional economy.”

Brian Darmody, the associate vice president for research and economic development at the University of Maryland and president of the Association of University Research Parks.

This new Lab is part of a effort to cluster groups of scientific research together. The three areas of technology the clusters focus on are;

• Language and National Security
  • Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL)
  • National Foreign Language Center (NLFC)
  • Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)
• Environmental and earth sciences, weather prediction, and global climate change
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) As of June 2010 this is still unfinished due to bankruptcy proceedings.
  • The University of Maryland/Pacific Northwest National Lab Joint Global Change Research Institute (JGCRI)
  • Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC)
• Food Safety and security
  • United States Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)
  • UM/FDA Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN)
  • UM Center for Food, Nutrition and Agriculture Policy (CFNAP)
  • Food and Drug Administration Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN)

More details here