Andrea Ottesen

Dr. Ottesen began her FDA career in 2003 as a Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN) masters student, working on a collaborative project with the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) and the Department of Plants Sciences and Landscape Architecture (PSLA) of the University of Maryland. After studying the impact of antibiotic pesticides on the microbiome of an apple crop for her masters, she began PhD work which pioneered a metagenomic approach to agricultural food safety. She returned to CFSAN as an ORISE Research Fellow after the completion of her PhD in 2009 to coordinate agricultural metagenomic research for FDA.

Dr. Ottesen worked for ten years leading metagenomic research in the Division of Microbiology to modernize public health response to outbreak investigations using whole genome sequencing (WGS) and metagenomic data before joining the Office of Research at the Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) in 2020. Currently, she is a senior principal investigator in the Division of Emerging Technologies in the Office of Applied Science at CVM where she works with the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) to advance antimicrobial resistance monitoring using metagenomic approaches. She is Chair emeritus of the Microbiome Working Group of FDA and spent many years contributing to inter-center work to further microbiome sciences at the agency. Dr. Ottesen has also served as adjunct faculty in PSLA, UMD (since 2009) and actively mentors undergraduates, masters and PhD students.