Dr. John L Koontz

Dr. John L. Koontz is an interdisciplinary research scientist in U.S. FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Office of Food Safety, Division of Food Processing Science and Technology where his research focuses on food packaging safety.  With experience solving research problems in both food and food contact material systems, Dr. Koontz has led projects involving active food packaging, polymer processing, cyclodextrin inclusion complexation of food additives, lipid oxidation, and chemical migration from food packaging.  Since joining the FDA in 2008, his research has focused on experimental migration testing of substances from food-contact materials into foods, refining polymer parameters used in migration modeling simulation, and the effect of new processing technologies on the migration characteristics of flexible packaging materials. The outcome of these experimental migration datasets supports the regulatory activities within CFSAN's Office of Food Additive Safety.  Dr. Koontz serves as a subject-matter expert on container integrity and is a training instructor in the Food Container Integrity Analysis laboratory course for FDA's Office of Regulatory Affairs.  Dr. Koontz received his Ph.D. degree in food science from Virginia Tech.