Meet CFSAN Leadership
Susan T. Mayne, Ph.D.
Director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
Steven M. Musser, Ph.D.
Deputy Center Director for Scientific Operations
Douglas Stearn, J.D.
Deputy Center Director for Regulatory Affairs
Susan T. Mayne, Ph.D.
Director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
Dr. Susan Mayne is an internationally recognized public health leader and scientist. As CFSAN Director, Dr. Mayne has led significant public health achievements, which include issuing the foundational rules and guidances of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), making the Nutrition Facts label more informative and easier to use, and setting sodium reduction targets for industry to improve the healthfulness of the U.S. food supply, among many others.
Read Dr. Susan Mayne's Full Bio
Steven M. Musser, Ph.D.
Deputy Center Director for Scientific Operations
Dr. Musser is the Deputy Center Director for Scientific Operations at 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 100 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 and his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Maryland-Baltimore. He then 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 and became the Branch Chief of the Instrumentation and Biophysics Branch six years later. Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Musser was the Director of the Office of Regulatory Science at CFSAN.
Douglas Stearn, J.D.
Deputy Center Director for Regulatory Affairs
Douglas Stearn is currently serving as the deputy director for regulatory affairs for the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In this position, he has direct oversight and responsibility for regulatory programs overseeing the food supply under FDA’s jurisdiction, including compliance functions and regulatory programs involving food safety, outbreak response, and dietary supplements.
He previously served as the director of FDA’s Office of Enforcement and Import Operations between November 2013 and April 2018, where he had responsibility for overseeing the execution of the agency’s import operations and compliance activities that cut across the commodities FDA regulates. Between January 2009 and November 2013, Mr. Stearn served as the assistant director and then the deputy director of the Office of Compliance within FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER).
Prior to joining CDER, Mr. Stearn served as the director of the Division of Compliance Policy in the Office of Regulatory Affairs for almost two years. Immediately before joining FDA, Mr. Stearn worked as a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Consumer Litigation for over fifteen years. In the course of his work at the Department of Justice, Mr. Stearn litigated numerous civil and criminal cases referred by FDA and other consumer protection agencies.