Fresh Take Fridays — Handwashing Roulette or Measure the Meaningful: Hand Washes per Employee Hour

Dr. Amanda M. Wilson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community, Environment & Policy at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. Dr. Wilson studies microbial exposure and risk assessment, risk-risk tradeoffs, human behavior, and exposure modeling. She received her Ph.D. in environmental health sciences at the University of Arizona and her postdoctoral training at the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Utah.

Dr. Purni Wickramasinghe leads the restaurant food safety risk assessment and mitigation strategy at Chick-fil-A, Inc., where she has served since 2021. She integrates scientific risk assessment, machine learning, and advanced analytics to identify and prioritize enterprise food safety risks, translating complex data into strategic insights that guide mitigation efforts across the business. Prior to joining Chick-fil-A, Dr. Wickramasinghe conducted postdoctoral research at Rutgers University, investigating the influence of gut microbiota on reproductive hormones and the role of polyphenols in metabolic disease management. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from Monash University, a Master’s degree in Food Microbiology from Chonbuk National University, and a Ph.D. in Food Microbiology, with an emphasis in Natural Products Chemistry, from the University of Tennessee.

Jim Arbogast is a scientist that entered the world of product development after getting his B.A. in Chemistry from Carleton College, followed by earning a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from UCLA. Dr. Arbogast has worked at Clorox, Dial, and GOJO where he has formulated hundreds of consumer products and made many contributions as a hygiene science ambassador, most recently for PURELL solutions. He has made numerous presentations at a wide variety of scientific conferences, been part of multiple popular press articles, has been an inventor on more than 70 patents and co-authored >60 peer-reviewed publications. All of those are driven by his passion for educating on public health topics, advancing hygiene science and improving policies and practices in the spirit of reducing food safety risk and infection prevention.