November 18, 2019
Emma Mills awarded a National Association of Flavors and Food-Ingredient Systems 2019 Scholarship Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement - Congratulations for a well-deserved recognition!
November 11, 2019
Kovac lab was well represented at this year's Allegheny Branch American Society for Microbiology meeting that took place at the Saint Francis University in Loretto, PA.
November 2, 2019
Join us in the FDSC 497 - Foodborne Pathogen Genomic Epidemiology course offered in Spring 2020!
October 17, 2019
Congratulations to Gabriella Pinto and Jingzhang (Barry) Feng for winning Department of Food Science undergraduate research awards. Gabriella and Barry are senior undergraduate students majoring in Food Science. Thanks to the Department for a generous support of our undergraduate researchers!
October 15, 2019
Food. It’s one of those things that connects us all. From jet-set billionaires to slum-dwelling street urchins, everyone needs to eat. Yet, in our modern, technocratic, globalized world, very few people have a direct relationship with the production of the food they need to survive. The vast majority of us buy our food from others, whether at a farm stand or supermarket shelf, which means there is almost always supply chain involved. And along that supply chain, between harvest, storage, processing, transportation, and preparation, there are lots of potential opportunities for food to pick up harmful contaminants.
October 2, 2019
Cassidy Prince has learned a great deal about foodborne pathogens while working in the lab of Jasna Kovac, Penn State assistant professor of food science. She also has learned how gratifying it can be to pass what she has learned onto others.
September 21, 2019
Doctoral candidate Mara Cloutier is passionate about researching microbiomes and opening up this rapidly expanding field of study to others through the Data Analysis Working Group. Our Ph.D. student Taejung Chung was one of the co-founders of the DAWG.
August 23, 2019
Congratulations to Ellie for publishing the first paper resulting from her 7,000 miles of sampling trips!
July 29, 2019
Congratulations to mBiome PhD student in Food Science Laura Rolon for winning a NE SARE Graduate Student Grant.
July 1, 2019
Congratulations to Gabriella Pinto for a College of Agricultural Sciences undergraduate research award.
June 28, 2019
A two-week training on foodborne pathogen detection methods, focused on dairy, will help educators and government agencies in Ethiopia ensure the safety of dairy products in that country.
May 1, 2019
Jasna Kovac, assistant professor of food science in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, recently was named recipient of the Institut Merieux Young Investigator Award in Antimicrobial Resistance from the International Association for Food Protection.
February 14, 2019
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.
December 15, 2018
Congratulations to Jingzhang (Barry) Feng for a College of Agricultural Sciences undergraduate research grant award.
November 28, 2018
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.
November 23, 2018
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.
November 15, 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!
November 11, 2018
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.
October 31, 2018
Students in FDSC 409 - Laboratory in Food Microbiology have presented their creative Halloween projects to a Food Science jury.
October 3, 2018
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.
September 27, 2018
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.
August 5, 2018
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.
June 25, 2018
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!
June 23, 2018
Our lab members Emma Mills and Xiaoxuan (Meg) Shi received Penn State College of Ag Sciences Undergraduate Research Awards for their research proposals. Congratulations!
June 5, 2018
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.
April 7, 2018
When spring refuses to come to State College, we go after it across the Atlantic.
March 29, 2018
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.
March 28, 2018
Congratulations to undergraduate lab member Xiaoxuan (Meg) Shi for being accepted for the CONSERVE Summer Internship Program!
March 14, 2018
Centre county middle school girls visited Kovac lab to explore yogurt-fermenting microbes an learn about food microbiology.
February 8, 2018
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.
