 I'm Frédéric Van Oostbeek. I'm a senior lecturer at the Physics Department at the University of Auckland. The food industry in New Zealand assesses the food safety by using plate count. So bacteria are put on a agar plate and the bacteria are left to grow. Then the bacteria are counted and that's how a sample is known to be contaminated or not. The process takes two or three days to get results. There are two drawbacks. First, it's the cost of recall if it's not picked up on time but also the food needs to be stored for a few days while waiting for the results. My research focus on biophotonics, which is the use of light to monitor, understand and image biological processes. At the moment I have three PhD and an honor students, one postdocs and we are two academics working on the different aspects of the project. Currently, we are working with a company called Veritai that is based in Crouchers to develop a device to assess food safety. The device itself, when fully developed, will be able to measure bacteria within minutes. The bacteria are tagged with a fluorescent dye and then the fluorescent signal is measured carefully to infer the number of bacteria in the sample. It will benefit the food industry in New Zealand because they will have a device that can reliably and cheaply forecast the results of plate count. In the future, we hope to be able to identify specific bacterial type using, for example, the difference in the spectrum of the fluorescence.