The United Natural Products Alliance (UNPA), Salt Lake City, UT, has appointed former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official Larisa Pavlick to the newly created position of Vice President, Regulatory & Compliance.

In her new position, Ms. Pavlick will oversee and lead the association’s efforts to assist its members and the industry comply with dietary supplement GMP regulations and assist in its overall regulatory affairs initiatives involving FDA, the Federal Trade Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and others state and federal agencies.

“Larisa’s appointment greatly strengthens our ability to fulfill UNPA’s goal of ensuring safety, science, quality and consumer confidence in the dietary supplement marketplace,” said UNPA President Loren Israelsen. “Our growing membership now has an in-house, boots-on-the-ground, good manufacturing practice (GMP) specialist with many years of facility inspection experience and an intimate understanding of regulatory compliance issues. Her expertise will provide immediate improvements to and expansion of our quality assurance initiatives, providing our membership with immediate and crucial benefit.”

Before her UNPA appointment, Ms. Pavlick worked for nearly eight years as a consumer safety officer/investigator for FDA in its Denver District Office, conducting general food and supplement GMP inspections, including for 21 CFR, Parts 110 and 111. Also, she has received FDA training for 21 CFR 117, the Food Safety Modernization Act. She received additional FDA training at the National Center for Natural Products Research at the University of Mississippi for quality assessment of botanical ingredients, authentication, standardization and QA of botanical dietary ingredients, and HPTLC for the analysis of medicinal plants.

“It’s clear that responsible dietary supplement companies want to operate in compliance with all applicable regulations, but my experience from investigations in more than 200 manufacturing facilities shows that they may not have the tools or resources to do so,” Ms. Pavlick said. “I’m excited to move from a position of only documenting violations to being able to make available the implementable solutions necessary to help ensure compliance. Starting in 2017, we will provide an expanded level of training, education, coaching and mentoring for UNPA members and the industry at large.”

Prior to joining FDA, Ms. Pavlick had more than 12 years of experience in the dietary supplement industry, including tenures at Amrion and Univera Life Sciences, specializing in product development, quality, regulatory and operations. She has strong experience and training in quality systems, compliance and regulatory affairs, daily operations, brand management, technical purchasing and product and business development. She also worked at Industrial Labs (IL), an independent testing laboratory and at NSF International. At IL, she helped companies to develop testing and monitoring programs for dietary supplements. While at NSF, she worked within the Dietary Supplement Group assisting with GMP Certification and Product Registration.