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IAFP 2025 Call for Symposia, Roundtables, and Workshops

The International Association for Food Protection is accepting submissions for symposia and roundtables for IAFP 2025 to be held in Cleveland, Ohio,July 27–30. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, October 1, 2024. No late submissions will be accepted. Proposals must be submitted using the online submission program located on the IAFP website at www.foodprotection.org. 

Submissions are also being accepted for IAFP 2025 Pre-Meeting Workshops to be held July 25 and July 26 in Cleveland. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, October 1, 2024. 

With a reputation for quality content, the IAFP Annual Meeting features more than1,100 technical, 
poster and symposia presentations detailing current information on a variety of topics relating to food safety. The quantity and quality of presentations provide information on the latest methods and technologies available. Top industry, academic, and government food safety professionals attend each meeting. This broad mix of more than 3,500 attendees representing more than 50 countries around the world includes professionals in quality control, processing operations, regulatory inspections, consulting groups, risk assessment, research and development, food toxicology, microbiological research, plant management, technical services, and HACCP management.

The abstract deadline for poster and technical presentations is Tuesday, January 14, 2025.


Trending Video

From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids