Multidisciplinary Teams for Engineering in Food Safety Applications – Bridges between Engineering and Biology

A team of undergraduate students from mechanical engineering and poultry science was assembled and worked cooperatively on a food safety project. The particular problem addressed was the development of a non-chemical-based clean-in-place system for cleaning the piping used to transport giblets in a poultry processing plant. The design and testing of the system required engineers to work with poultry plant processors and microbiologists. In addition to the technical challenges, there were challenges associated with implementing a multidisciplinary project into existing academic programs. In this paper, the approaches used to overcome these challenges and their effectiveness are discussed.