Professor Francis Butler is a Full Professor in the UCD School of Biosystems and Food Engineering. Professor Butler is an engineer by training and joined UCD as an academic in Biosystems Engineering in 1990 having previously worked in production management in the Irish dairy Industry. He was appointed a Professor in 2007 and was the Head of School, UCD School of Biosystems Engineering from 2011 – 2014. He was Head of Subject, Biosystems and Food Engineering, until September 2022. He was appointed a full Professor in 2023. His teaching responsibilities at undergraduate and graduate level include modules in food chain integrity, global cold chain safety and bioprocess engineering principles. He was the programme coordinator for the UCD MSC Food Safety and Risk Analysis and also the UCD coordinator for the International Master in Food Management and Safety, a joint initiative between UCD, The University of Lorraine, France, and the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. Professor Butler is a Principal Investigator in the UCD Institute for Food and Health and the UCD Centre for Food Safety. Professor Butler main research interests are in food safety with a particular focus on food chain integrity and quantitative risk assessment of microbiological and chemical hazards in foods. Increasingly he is using next generation sequencing techniques and data analytics to identify the sources and routes of transmission of pathogens through the food chain to control their occurrence in foods. Recently, he was awarded a European Food Risk Assessment Fellowship by the European Food Safety Authority as well as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie co-funded Career-FIT Career Development Fellowship for work in using next generation sequencing as a tool in microbial risk assessment. Recent projects include coordinating an EFSA funded Partnering Programme with three international partners. Professor Butler has been an active partner in EU funded research projects in the area of food chain integrity. Projects include FOODINTEGRITY, PROSAFEBEEF, QPORKCHAINS. He also coordinated the SIGMACHAIN Project that identified and managed vulnerabilities in the food chain.