School of Agriculture, Faculty of Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Environment
Kostas Koutsoumanis is currently serving as a Professor, Head of Laboratory of Food Microbiology and Hygiene and Head of the Department of Food Science and Technology in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He received his B.S. degree in Agriculture Engineering from the Agricultural University of Athens, Greece, in 1997 and Ph.D. (Food Science) degree from the same University in 2000. After serving as a Research Associate in the Department of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University he took a Lecturer position in the Department of Food Science and Technology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2002, and he was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2007, Associate Professor in 2013 and Professor in 2017. Currently, he teaches several graduate and MSc courses including General Microbiology, Food Quality and Safety Assurance, Predictive Microbiology and Risk Assessment and Applied Statistics in Food Science. From 2011 he is a member, from 2015 to 2018 the vice-Chair and from 2018 the Chair of the Biohazard panel of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). He is also a member of Joint FAO/WHO Expert Meeting on Microbiological Risk Assessment (JEMRA) roster of experts. He is Associate editor in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology and member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Food Protection, International Journal of Food Microbiology, Food Microbiology and Current Opinion in Food Science. As a principal investigator or co-investigator, Kostas Koutsoumanis has received over 3 million euros in grants, contracts or donations for research in the field of microbiological quality and safety of foods. Recent research efforts have centered on the microbiological quality and safety of fresh and processed food products, predictive microbiology, microbial risk assessment, stochastic modeling approaches in food safety and quality, development and application of Time Temperature Indicators (TTI) for monitoring food quality and safety, etc. The research results have been presented and published at more than 180 refereed scientific journal articles, 15 book chapters, and 150 papers in conference proceedings with more than 8500 citations and h-index=55.