Office of Continuing Professional Education (OCPE)

Kimberly Smith had been working for only two weeks as a process engineer when she found herself struggling with an entirely new language – the lingo of food chemistry and microbiology.

“It was like a foreign language,” said Smith, who helps manufacture soups and other foods at Campbell’s Soup.

Last summer, she radically improved her fluency with an intensive five-day Introduction to Food Science class, offered by the Office of Continuing Professional Education (OCPE) at Rutgers University.

“The course helped me understand the basic language of food product development,” she said.  Now she can better talk the multi-disciplinary talk that all good food scientists must master.

NJ Department of Labor award will train incumbent workers of health care organizations

Several New Jersey health care facilities are getting a boost: their current front-line employees are receiving training to upgrade their skills from the Rutgers Office of Continuing Professional Education (OCPE) thanks to a $1 million grant awarded to OCPE by the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development (DOL). The goal: help individual workers feel more valued and be more productive; save organizations time and money while making them more competitive; and retain highly skilled, high wage positions in the state.

The 37^th Annual One-Day Educational Program to be held on Douglass Campus

If you’re a gardener, it’s never too soon to think spring.

For anyone with a passion for making things grow and bloom, the Rutgers NJAES Office of Continuing Professional Education (OCPE) will offer its 37^th Annual Home Gardeners School, Saturday, March 23, at Hickman Hall on the Douglass Campus in New Brunswick. Coffee/tea and registration begin at 8 a.m. and workshops will run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Featuring 35 workshops covering a variety of topics related to gardening and landscaping, the program gives both novice and experienced home gardeners  an opportunity to receive expert instruction, learn new horticulture skills, and connect with others who share their interests.

Obesity prevention experts from around the country will gather for an all-day conference on Tuesday, December 11, to present the latest research and innovative techniques used in the battle against obesity.

The conference, which is open to professionals in education, public health and related fields, and to parents, will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Hilton in East Brunswick.

His home inspection business hurt by a sluggish economy, Michael Lloyd decided to branch out, gaining skills to fix a major concern in his South Carolina community: high levels of indoor radon.

Lloyd last year became nationally certified to mitigate radon – a gas estimated to cause 21,000 lung-cancer deaths a year in the United States – at Rutgers University’s Eastern Regional Radon Training Center (ERRTC), one of four such centers established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Lloyd, whose business is based in Moore, S.C., has completed 100 mitigation jobs since he became certified. “It turned things around,’’ the former Garden State resident said.

In her second deployment to Iraq in 2011, Lyndhurst native Aysu Cesmebasi ran a dining hall that fed 12,000 Army and Air Force personnel twice a day, as the U.S. prepared to shut Joint Base Balad, its largest in that war-torn country.

The local contractor handling meals at the base had been let go, so Cesmebasi, a food advisor, oversaw a staff of 75 soldiers and airmen, ensuring they adhered to sanitary regulations.

“My biggest concern was safety,” recalled Cesmebasi, a 2008 graduate of the Environment and Public Health (EPH) course run by Rutgers' Office of Continuing Professional Education (OCPE). “I could not have a food-borne illness outbreak since it could impair our mission at a critical time.”