The Institute for Food Safety and Health (IFSH) National Center for Food Safety and Technology (NCFST) housed at Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech) is a food safety and applied nutrition research consortium of the US Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (FDA/CFSAN), Illinois Tech, and the food industry. Since the establishment in 1988, NCFST has successfully been providing a unique collaborative neutral ground where scientists with food safety and technology expertise from academia, government, and industry join forces and work together to address food safety, food defense, and nutrition issues of national significance. The successful results of the past 35 years by the NCFST are due to this collaborative way of working. NCFST is structured so that representatives of participating organizations play a role in helping establish policy and administrative procedures, as well as identifying long- and short-term research programs that address FDA and industry strategic needs. With this organizational structure, NCFST is uniquely positioned to build cooperative food safety programs on a foundation of knowledge about current industrial trends in food processing and packaging technologies, regulatory perspectives from public health organizations, and fundamental scientific expertise from academia. The NCFST collaborative research programs are coordinated through various inputs by participating representatives throughout the year. This includes regular meetings with the Executive Advisory Board, the Science Advisory Committee, and various Science Forums advising and recommending research topics in the five research platforms including Processing, Microbiology, Food Chemistry and Packaging, Proficiency Testing and Method Validation Research, and Nutrition. With an increasingly diverse domestic and global food supply, FDA continues to face complex food safety challenges associated with foods that it regulates. In 2011, the enactment of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) emphasized the need for a modern, prevention-based food safety system. Through the IFSH research consortium all parties work to help form a scientific basis for policy decisions affecting food safety and public health. In addition, NCFST is the coordinator of the Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance (FSPCA), the Sprouts Safety Alliance (SSA), and the Juice HACCP Alliance, leveraging the expertise of academia, industry, and FDA for the purpose of developing and delivering standardized curricula related to FSMA requirements. The outreach on preventive controls provided by these Alliances strengthens integral parts of the FDA's FSMA implementation strategies. IFSH will continue to carry out multidisciplinary applied research; leverage collaborations with government, academia, and the food industry; develop and implement outreach and communications programs with stakeholders; and support the continued implementation of FSMA.