Jasna Kovac

Jasna Kovac

Lester Earl and Veronica Casida Career Development Professor of Food Safety and Assistant Professor of Food Science for her Early Achievement in Research

Dr. Kovac came to Penn State in 2017 as one of the first tenure-track hires in the Microbiome faculty cluster. Her lab focuses on precision food safety, which integrates microbiological, next-generation sequencing, and cell culture methods to achieve precise and accurate taxonomic identification and prediction of phenotypes relevant to microbial food safety.

As a graduate student, post-doc, and faculty member, she has published 4 book chapters and 57 peer-reviewed scientific papers (42 of which have been since she came to Penn State), appearing in highly reputable journals such as Nature Communications, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and Microbiome. As of the time of her nomination, her work was cited 1,260 times, resulting in an h-index of 21 and an i10 index of 33.

Since joining Penn State, Dr. Kovac has secured more than $4 million in extramural funding across 17 grants and contracts from 11 funding agencies, including USDA, NIH, USAID, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, FDA, and the CDC.

Her research excellence has also been recognized by the Institut Mérieux and the International Association for Food Protection in 2019 with the Institut Mérieux Young Investigator Award in Antimicrobial Resistance.

The reach of her work extends well beyond the university with collaborations across Pennsylvania’s produce industry and the FDA to help reduce the prevalence of listeria in fruit packing establishments. She has also collaborated with public health officials to develop a bioinformatics tool that is now employed by over 500 users from public health, government, and academia labs.

In just the short time she has been at Penn State, Dr. Kovac has enabled access to transformative research experiences in her lab for 37 undergraduate students. She currently co-leads a USDA NIFA Research and Extension Experiences for Undergraduates program and an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program, both of which have been effective in recruiting Latinx students into the Penn State Food Science graduate programs.

She has advised 4 graduate students who have graduated and is currently advising 6 more, some of which were recruited via a USDA NIFA National Needs Fellowship Project she is co-leading. Some of these fellows are also participating in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee of the Department of Food Science, which is chaired by Dr. Kovac. She is also serving as a member of graduate degree committees for an additional 15 students at Penn State and 2 from other universities, advising one visiting scholar, and currently mentoring one post-doc and refugee scientist from Ukraine.

Dr. Kovac is a respected collaborator among her colleagues at Penn State as well, building partnerships with faculty in Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology, Electrical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Animal Science, Ecosystem Science and Management, and Plant Science. One colleague noted of her, “It is rare that a junior faculty member takes on such leadership, by modelling grantsmanship, innovative teaching and broader impacts, and is skilled at influencing senior faculty members to follow.”