Steven Musser

Dr. Musser is the Deputy Center Director for Scientific Operations at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN). In addition to managing the Center’s scientific operations, he oversees the Center’s activities in cosmetics safety, color certification, pre-market review of food additives, food contact notifications and foods derived from bioengineered plants. He has directed the Center’s research in precedent setting areas of food and cosmetic safety research, which include food allergen detection, methods for detecting chemical contaminants, dietary supplement analysis, and the use of whole genome sequencing during foodborne illness outbreak investigations. He has authored or co-authored more than 90 articles in the peer reviewed scientific literature and regularly speaks on CFSAN’s research at national and international scientific meetings.

Dr. Musser received his B.S. degree in Biology from Millersville University, his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Maryland-Baltimore, and completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute. He started his career at FDA in 1991 as a research chemist, moving into regulatory science management six years later as the Chief of the Instrumentation and Biophysics Branch. Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Musser was the Director of the Office of Regulatory Science at CFSAN.