Jasna Kovac, Ph.D., is the Lester Earl and Veronica Casida Career Development Associate Professor of Food Safety at The Pennsylvania State University. She earned her B.S. in microbiology and Ph.D. in biosciences with a focus on microbial biotechnology from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, followed by postdoctoral training at Cornell University, where she specialized in microbial genomics of foodborne pathogens.

Since joining Penn State’s Department of Food Science in 2017, Dr. Kovac has led research aimed at improving the microbial safety of food through a precision food safety approach. Her lab investigates how foodborne pathogens enter and persist in food production systems to inform the development of targeted strategies to detect and control them. Her work has advanced understanding of how environmental microbiota influence the survival and antimicrobial tolerance of Listeria monocytogenes in food processing environments and has refined the genomic taxonomy of the Bacillus cereus group to better predict strain-level virulence and resistance traits. Dr. Kovac also co-led international research efforts focused on the prevalence, distribution, and genomic characterization of foodborne pathogens in Ethiopian and Cambodian food supply chains, contributing to global food safety and capacity-building.

She is a member of the executive committee of the Penn State One Health Microbiome Center, the director of Biotechnological & Integrative Opportunities in Microbiome Sciences T32 graduate training program, and the recipient of several awards, including the ASM Early Career Environmental Research Award (2025), the Institute of Food Technologists’ Outstanding Young Scientist Award in Honor of Samuel Prescott (2023), and the Institut Mérieux Young Investigator Award in Antimicrobial Resistance (2019).