Jasna Kovac is an Associate Professor at The Pennsylvania State University's Department of Food Science. She earned her BSc in microbiology and a PhD in biosciences/biotechnology from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she studied molecular epidemiology of antimicrobial resistance in Campylobacter. Dr. Kovac conducted pre-doctoral and post-doctoral research in microbial genomics at the University of Oxford and Cornell University in Maiden and Wiedmann labs, respectively. In 2017, she started the precision food safety lab at The Pennsylvania State University. Her lab integrates next-generation sequencing and microbiological methods to investigate factors affecting foodborne pathogens' transmission, persistence, virulence, and antimicrobial resistance. One of the key research areas of her lab includes studying the role of environmental microbiota in the persistence and resistance of foodborne pathogens in food processing environments.