Salt Lake City, UT— The United Natural Products Alliance (UNPA) has appointed former U.S. Food and Drug Administration official Larisa Pavlick to the newly created position of Vice President, Regulatory & Compliance. In this new position, Pavlick will be responsible for overseeing and leading efforts by the association to assist its members and the industry comply with dietary supplement GMP regulations as well as overall regulatory affairs involving FDA, the Federal Trade Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and any other state of federal regulatory agency.

“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.”

Prior to this appointment, Pavlick worked for nearly eight years as a consumer safety officer/investigator for FDA in its Denver District Office where she conducted general food and supplement GMP inspections. She also received FDA training for 21 CFR 117, the Food Safety Modernization Act as well as 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.

Pavlick also has two years experience in the dietary supplement industry prior to her time at FDA, with tenures at Amrion and Univera Life Sciences, specializing in product development, quality, regulatory and operations. She also worked at Industrial Labs (IL), an independent testing laboratory and at NSF International. “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,” said Pavlick. “Starting in 2017, we will provide an expanded level of training, education, coaching and mentoring for UNPA members and the industry at large.”