ICoMST/RMC Speakers

Dr. Steven C. Ricke received his B.S. and M.S. from the Univ. of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL. and Ph.D. from the Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. Dr. Ricke was a USDA-ARS postdoctorate in the Microbiology Department at North Carolina State Univ. then joined Texas A&M Univ. as a professor in the Poultry Science Dept.  In 2005, he became the first holder of the new Donald “Buddy” Wray Endowed Chair in Food Safety and Director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Arkansas (UA) and was a faculty member of the Dept. of Food Science and Cellular and Molecular Graduate program until October 2020 he became the Director of the Meat Science and Animal Biologics Discovery Program in the Animal and Dairy Sciences Dept. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received the Poultry Sci. Assoc. (PSA) Research Award in 1999, American Egg Board award in 2006, PSA Evonik Award for Achievement in Poultry Science in 2019 and Broiler Council Award in 2020. He was honored as a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Faculty Fellow in 2002 and UA John White Outstanding Research Award in 2012.  He served as co-founder and former President of the Arkansas Association of Food Protection (AAFP). He was named an AAFP Fellow in 2015, a PSA Fellow in 2017, an International for Food Protection Fellow in 2019, a University of Wisconsin – CALS Distinguished Alumni in 2019 and received a University of Illinois ACES Career Achievement Award in 2022.  He served as an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer from 2015 to 2017. Dr. Ricke’s foodborne research projects have emphasized studies on the growth, survival and pathogenesis of pathogens in the poultry gastrointestinal tract (GIT) and their interactions with the GIT microbiota. He is also exploring using the microbiome to characterize microbial ecology of meat processing.