APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:

• CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, apply internally through Workday.

• CURRENT PENN STATE STUDENT (not employed previously at the university) and seeking employment with Penn State, please login to Workday to complete the student application process. Please do not apply here, apply internally through Workday.

• If you are NOT a current employee or student, please click “Apply” and complete the application process for external applicants.

 

Approval of remote and hybrid work is not guaranteed regardless of work location. For additional information on remote work at Penn State, see Notice to Out of State Applicants.

This is a term position; length of the term will be discussed during the interview process. Continuation past the term length discussed will be based on university need, performance, and/or availability of funding.

 

POSITION SPECIFICS

Postdoctoral Scholar – Food Safety

The Department of Food Science at The Pennsylvania State University seeks a Postdoctoral Scholar to support an interdisciplinary research program focused on food safety, microbial ecology, and pathogen survival in food and environmental systems. The Postdoctoral Scholar will conduct independent and collaborative research under the supervision of a faculty principal investigator and will contribute to the design, execution, analysis, and dissemination of research findings.

The research program emphasizes:

• Survival, viability, and inactivation of foodborne pathogens under food production, processing, and environmental conditions.

• Interactions between foodborne pathogens and microbial communities influencing persistence and resilience.

• Exposure assessment and quantitative modeling of pathogens in food and environmental matrices

Responsibilities

Research and Scholarship

• Design and conduct laboratory-based research examining the growth, survival, and inactivation of foodborne pathogens (e.g., Campylobacter, Salmonella, Bacillus cereus) under diverse environmental, processing, and microbiome-influenced conditions, including biofilm systems.

• Apply culture-based, molecular, and quantitative microbiology techniques, including microbial enrichment, enumeration, isolation, DNA extraction, and PCR-based analyses.

• Analyze experimental data using appropriate statistical and computational methods to support peer-reviewed publications.

• Develop and apply predictive microbiology and/or pathogen inactivation models based on experimental data.

• Conduct exposure assessment and quantitative microbial risk assessment using laboratory data and published literature.

• Lear, conduct or support bioinformatics analyses related to microbiome or genomic sequencing datasets, as applicable.

Publications, Presentations and Proposal Development

• Lead and contribute to the prepar