Latest News

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Employing advanced genetic-tracing techniques and sharing the data produced in real time could limit the spread of bacteria — Bacillus cereus — which cause foodborne illness, according to researchers who implemented whole-genome sequencing of a pathogen-outbreak investigation.

Congratulations to Jingzhang (Barry) Feng for a College of Agricultural Sciences undergraduate research grant award.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Food safety specialists in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences will collaborate with scientists at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and Kansas State University on a project to improve the safety and quality of Ethiopian dairy foods.

Thanks to all the students and faculty of the University of Puerto Rico - Aguadilla for attending the whole genome sequencing workshop on November 17, 2018.

Are you interested in learning how to trace foodborne pathogens using whole genome sequences? Join us in a new special topics course FDSC 497 Foodborne Pathogen Genomic Epidemiology in Spring 2019!

Congratulations to our lab member Ashley Weaver for placing second in the best Undergraduate Medical Microbiology Poster category at the Annual Meeting of the Allegheny Branch American Society for Microbiology.

Students in FDSC 409 - Laboratory in Food Microbiology have presented their creative Halloween projects to a Food Science jury.

Congratulations to Xiaoqing (Ellie) Tan, M.S. student in Food Science, for her 1st place finish in The Penn State Microbiome Center Annual Networking Event poster competition held on October 2, 2018 in the Life Sciences Bridge.

Taejung Chung presented his research at the ASM Conference on Rapid Applied Microbial Next-Generation Sequencing and Bioinformatic Pipelines held on September 23–26, 2018 in the Washington DC area.

After two fruitful months of independent research at Penn State Department of Food Science through USDA-funded REEU project "Bugs in my food", Hephzibah Nwanosike and Marysabel Mendez Acevedo shared some of their impressions and experiences.

Presenting our past and ongoing work in a talk "Applying whole-genome sequencing to illuminate dairy sporeformers" on Tuesday June 26 at ADSA 2018 | https://www.adsa.org/2018/. Thanks to the organizing committee for a kind invitation!

Our lab members Emma Mills and Xiaoxuan (Meg) Shi received Penn State College of Ag Sciences Undergraduate Research Awards for their research proposals. Congratulations!

Beginning of June Penn State Department of Food Science welcomed 13 Bugs in my Food (BIMG) Undergraduate Fellows that joined faculty labs to train their laboratory and science communication skills in the context of food microbiology.

When spring refuses to come to State College, we go after it across the Atlantic.

Undergraduate lab members Sarah Koay, Caitlin Luyster and Thomas Pastor presented their research on cocoa safety and antimicrobial resistance at the Gamma Sigma Delta Research Expo at Penn State on March 27th.

Congratulations to undergraduate lab member Xiaoxuan (Meg) Shi for being accepted for the CONSERVE Summer Internship Program!

Centre county middle school girls visited Kovac lab to explore yogurt-fermenting microbes an learn about food microbiology.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Faculty in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences are spearheading an initiative that will provide selected doctoral students with the opportunity for extensive study in the emerging field of agricultural microbiome research.

Wild and Tamed Phytobiomes | June 19 - 22, 2017

We are excited to congratulate Caitlin Luyster and Sarah Koay for their proposals being selected to receive a College of Agricultural Sciences Undergraduate Research Award for Spring 2018.