The Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, has reappointed a number of members to the board of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI).
The two appointees are Pat Knight and Prof. Francis Butler.
Pat Knight has over 30 years experience in management in both the public and private sectors.
He also has several years of experience as a board member of the FSAI. He was already a non-executive member of the boards of the FSAI and the Irish Aviation Authority.
He currently works selectively as a human resources (HR) manager, and has previously served as HR manager for An Post Group from 2004-2019.
Prior to that he was general manager HR with Waterford Crystal from 1986 to 2004, and before that he worked as personal manager with Bord na Móna.
The Department of Health said that Knight has a track record of business transformation, including negotiating, and implementing strategic, operational, cultural and organisational change; and establishing and maintaining standards of corporate governance.
He is reappointed to the board of the FSAI with effect from June 2, 2024 until to June 1, 2029.
Prof. Francis Butler is a professor in the University College Dublin (UCD) Centre for Food Safety. He is the head of subject in biosystems engineering at UCD. His main research is in food safety with a particular focus on traceability systems and quantitative risk assessment of microbiological and chemical hazards in foods.
He coordinates the UCD Masters in Food Safety and Risk Analysis, and has led several large scale quantitative microbial food risk assessments and has made contributions in the characterisation of microbial distribution in food and developing sampling strategies for containments in foods.
Prof. Butler is currently leading projects using molecular microbiological techniques to identify the sources and routes of transmission of pathogens through the food chain.
His other research interests included food chain integrity and the traceability of foods.
Prof. Butler has published over 150 publications in referred journals, with over 100 referred papers in international conference proceedings and over 150 additional national conference and other workshop presentations.
He has coordinated or partnered in over 30 research projects including four EU framework projects.
He has trained a substantial team of researchers and scholars, including 20 PhD students to completion and 13 research masters students, as well as 14 post-doctoral researchers.
Prof. Butler is reappointed with effect from May 21, 2024 until May 20, 2027.