Mahmoud Almasri
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Engineering
Salmonella bacteria cause about 1.35 million U.S. infections, 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths each year.
- Fields
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
Salmonella
food safety
foodborne illness
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2026
What they work on
- Develop a Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy sensor that uses metal nanoantennas on a side-polished optical fiber to quickly detect and measure Salmonella types in poultry samples.
- Build an impedance-based biosensor that concentrates Salmonella to detectable levels and identifies it from changes in electrical signals, and a nanopore sequencing sensor that tells strains apart by single DNA-letter differences.
- Create a cloud-based decision support system that uses machine learning to predict Salmonella levels and shelf life, and optimization to plan sensor placement, food distribution and staffing across the poultry supply chain.
More about the research
They cost the economy an estimated $4.1 billion annually. Infection rates have not fallen in three decades. Poultry is a major route, and today's testing is too slow to catch contamination as food moves through the supply chain. This project, carried out with poultry companies, supply chain partners, food banks and Extension educators, aims to build a sensor-enabled decision support system called SENS-D. The system would detect Salmonella and help reduce contamination from farm to consumer.
Why it matters
Faster, cheaper Salmonella testing could help poultry processors, distributors and food banks find contamination before chicken reaches consumers. This could reduce foodborne illness, hospitalizations and deaths. The grant notes that the system could be adapted to detect other pathogens in beef, pork, dairy and produce. That could ease part of the estimated $152 billion yearly U.S. burden of foodborne illness.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rupa Haldavnekar
University of Oklahoma, OK·Biomedical Engineering
Develop a surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) sensing approach, a light-based method that reads molecular fingerprints, to detect subtle blood-based changes signaling early ovarian tumor formation.
Haoran Wei
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Engineering·Early-career
Determine how a contaminant's chemical properties, its binding to the sensor surface, and water acidity and salts control SERS (surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy) sensitivity, using adsorption measurements, controlled water experiments, and density functional theory modeling.
Morshed Khandaker
University of Central Oklahoma, OK·Materials Science
Assess the market and translation potential of a multifunctional absorbent food packaging pad by investigating the food industry first-hand, to judge whether it can be made into a scalable, low-cost product.
The school
University of Missouri-Columbia: 21 labs on PI Pages, $509M a year on research, 260 research doctorates a year.
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