Francis Butler, Professor Butler is a Professor in the UCD Centre for Food Safety. 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 has led several large scale quantitative microbial food risk assessments and has made some novel contributions in the characterisation of microbial distributions in food and developing novel sampling strategies for contaminants in foods. He is currently leading several projects using molecular microbiological techniques to identify the sources and routes of transmission of pathogens through the food chain. Professor Butler has published 170 publications in refereed journals of international standing, with over 100 refereed papers in international conference proceedings and over 150 additional national conference and other workshop presentations. He has a proven track record in attracting funds from external peer adjudicated grant agencies. 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. He has served on several FAO/WHO expert meetings on Microbiological Risk Assessment.