Sessions
Steps to Accreditation - General Session
3:00 PM - 3:45 PM Wed
Heather McLemore is currently an Accreditation Officer on the Life Sciences team with the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA), where she has been employed since January 2019. She assists in the day-to-day accreditation operations, which includes maintaining all aspects of the accreditation process for the conformity assessment bodies to which she is assigned, from application to final accreditation. Ms. McLemore passed the ISO/IEC 17025:2017 auditor course in February 2019, and became an A2LA staff approved lead assessor in January 2020. With her background in food microbiology, Heather also serves as the main point of contact for all inquiries related to the AOAC International Guidelines.
Prior to joining A2LA, Heather worked for 10 years for Laboratory Corporation of America in Boise, ID, as a Support Services Team Leader. Her main focus was maintaining a LIMS-based patient database. She was also involved in multiple areas of customer service and training, both remote and on-site. Before that, she gained over 8 years’ experience as a food microbiologist in the meat industry, working for both a beef slaughter facility and a furthered processed meats facility. She is proficient in multiple food microbiology technologies, including but not limited to Petrifilm, automated PCR, VIDAS, and MPN. Her other responsibilities included staff training, revising and creating SOPs, and assisting labs in other locations as needed.
Ms. McLemore has a B.S. in food science from Iowa State University, located in Ames, Iowa.