Professor Michael Gibney has been appointed as Chairman of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI). Additionally, Mr Raymond O’Rourke, a qualified barrister and a food regulatory and consumer affairs lawyer has been appointed to the board of the FSAI and Prof. Charles Daly, Emeritus Professor of Food Science and Technology at University College, Cork has been reappointed to the board.
Professor Gibney is a Professor of Food and Health at University College, Dublin’s (UCD) Institute of Food and Health. Originally a graduate of UCD, with a Masters in Agricultural Chemistry, Prof. Gibney completed a PhD in Sydney University. Prof Gibney held the position of Professor of Nutrition and subsequently Dean of Research with Trinity College, Dublin for 23 years. He then took up the post of Director of the UCD Institute of Food and Health in 2006. He has served on several EU and UN committees on nutrition and health including the EU Scientific Committee for Food and the EU Scientific Steering Committee, where he chaired its BSE Working Group. In 2010, he was appointed to the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Joint Programme Initiative on Food and Health Research. He is former President of the Nutrition Society and has published in excess of 250 peer reviewed scientific papers in Public Health Nutrition and Molecular Nutrition. He is the principal investigator on several national and EU projects. Prof. Gibney previously served as a Board member of the FSAI from 1999 to 2009
Welcoming the appointment, Prof Alan Reilly, Chief Executive, FSAI said Prof Gibney “will be a tremendous asset to our Board’s cumulative deliberations. His appointment reaffirms our science-based ethos which underpins all the decisions, policies and actions of our organisation. He has an impeccable global reputation for research on food and nutrition and has served on a number of high-level advisory committees in this area, both nationally and at EU level.”