The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) welcomes Dr. Douglas F. Britton, Manager, Agricultural Technology Research Program, and Senior Research Engineer, Georgia Tech Research Institute, who will speak on "Innovation in Food and Poultry Processing," on Monday, February 25, 2013. The seminar begins at Noon in Room 114 of the Callaway Manufacturing Research building.

Dr. Britton serves as the Program Manager for the Agricultural Technology Research Program (ATRP) at Georgia Tech, which is highly focused on innovation and the development of key technologies for the food and agriculture sectors with a specific focus on poultry processing challenges. Working closely with stakeholders in academia, industry and the public service sector, his efforts entail identifying the key unmet challenges facing the poultry, agriculture and food processing sectors and translating them into actionable research initiatives. He is passionate about fostering transformational innovation and developing leadership strategies for maximizing the impact of research.

Dr. Britton’s technical expertise is in image and signal processing and the development of image processing algorithms to inspect non-uniform/natural product for real-time automatic grading. He has been instrumental in the development of several imaging-based systems related to food processing including citrus, baked goods, whole birds and a variety of poultry products. Dr. Britton received his B.S. degree in Engineering from LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Poultry Science Association (PSA), and the American Association of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE).  In the fall of 2012, he was inducted as a fellow of the Food Systems Leadership Institute.

Innovation in Food and Poultry Processing—Abstract

With the world population estimated to grow by 30% to 9.1 billion by the year 2050, and the realization that arable land is actually decreasing as a result, the old adage of “doing more with less” is a distinct reality when it comes to the world’s food production systems. And within this conundrum lies an opportunity for transformational innovation in a domain that has been around as long as life itself – Food! Agriculture and Food are not often the subject of traditional engineering or manufacturing educations, but given the challenges associated with feeding a growing world, the opportunities will fall in the collaborative spaces between the modern agricultural sciences and the core engineering disciplines. This talk will present the variety of research activities ongoing in the Agricultural Technology Research Program at Georgia Tech. We will also discuss the unique challenges of meeting food safety requirements, the manipulating food and poultry products that are not uniform, as well as some of the environmental impact considerations for a modern food manufacturing facility.  Finally, we will define and discuss transformational innovation with respect to the food and agriculture space, and talk about the opportunities for reinventing the animal agriculture production and processing facilities of the future.  What should they look like, and how do we get there?