Director
Prof. Abdelrahim H. A. Hassan, program director of PD-FSM, is a former professor of Food Safety and Technology at Beni-Suef University. He joined Nile University as a professor and Quality Assurance Unit Director at the School of Biotechnology in Jan. 2023.
Prof. Hassan received a bachelor’s degree in veterinary medicine From Cairo University in 2004, and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Food Safety and Technology in 2008 and 2011, respectively. He has considerable experience of working in national and international educational and research institutions in Egypt and abroad. In 2012, he joined the Biosensors and Bioelectronics group at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2, Spain) as a postdoctoral scholar, where he had been working on the development of gold nanoparticles-based biosensors for food analysis. Then he returned to Spain as a postdoctoral researcher at ICN2, Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST) from 2016 to 2018 when he worked on the development of paper-based lateral flow biosensors for determining pathogenic microorganisms in food and water.
In 2018, he joined the Department of Food Science at Pennsylvania State University (PSU, USA) as a visiting professor. At PSU, in collaboration with faculty and researchers there, he developed a novel composite antimicrobial film based on biodegradable pullulan for combating pathogens in food. His work was successfully published as a patent by WIPO (PCT) in 2021. Regarding his professional experience in the field of food safety, he is a certified ServSafe Food Safety Instructor and exam proctor by the American National Restaurant Association, accredited by the American National Standard Institute (ANSI), and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additionally, he has been selected as an ad-hoc scientific reviewer of research proposals related to the impact of COVID-19 on food safety by the United States Department of Agriculture (USA). Because of his distinguished contributions to the food science field in the USA, he has been awarded lifetime membership from the American Gamma Sigma Delta Society of Agricultural Scientists.
In 2021, Dr. Hassan was promoted to full professor rank by the Scientific Committee of the Supreme Council of Egyptian Universities with about 16 years of teaching, research, mentoring, and outreach experience in food safety and related disciplines. Dr. Hassan has a proven research track record with more than 33 publications in international peer-reviewed journals and is a scientific peer-reviewer in more than 17 international journals in the areas of food science and technology, biosensors, microbiology, and biotechnology. Additionally, he was appointed as a reviewer member in the scientific committee for the promotion of professors and associate professors of the Supreme Council of Egyptian Universities in 2022, and an external auditor at the National Authority of Quality Assurance and Accreditation for Education (NAQAAE, Egypt) since 2021.