On Wednesday, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) announced that it had nominated Dr. Nikolaus Kriz as its new executive director.
“I am honoured and grateful to be nominated to lead EFSA. Together with its exceptional staff and experts, I look forward to guiding the organisation as we continue our vital mission to protect the health of EU citizens, animals, plants and the environment,” said Kriz after the nomination.
Who is Nikolaus Kriz?
Kriz has been with EFSA for more than eight years, and came to his new role role after five years heading up EFSA’s Risk Assessment Services (ENABLE) Department.
Since joining the EFSA, he has supported the European Commission in implementing the Animal Health Law, partnering on data collections to look at the disease risks shared by wildlife, humans and livestock, and setting up an animal disease data model.
He has been involved in the introduction of commodity risk assessments for high of high risk plants, and exploring the future risk of plant pests.
Whilst there, he delivered risk assessments on topics including bird flu, African swine fever, and rabbit welfare.
Lastly, he oversaw the support for new animal welfare legislation, developed within the Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy.
Before this, Kriz, a trained veterinary surgeon, spent more than 16 years at the European Medicines Agency, where he also worked in risk assessments.
In academia, he worked as a lecturer on equine clinical studies at the University of Glasgow.
What will be Kriz’s main challenges?
EFSA has a wide range of foods to evaluate and reevaluate.
Novel foods such as cultivated meat currently require approval after scrutiny by EFSA, and the complexity of this process is slowing down market adoption of these foods.
EFSA has been accused of putting European food at a “competitive disadvantage” compared with other parts of the world because the assessment process takes significantly longer.
The agency has now admitted that it needs to speed up its safety assessments, and is working with the European Commission to do so.
This could be changing soon, at least when it comes to novel foods. A draft version of European Commission’s Life Sciences Strategy, due for publication on July 2, contains suggestions that the upcoming Biotech Act may work towards fast-tracking applications, reports Euractiv.
How Kriz’s leadership will influence this, only time will tell.