Kendra Nightingale
Dr. Kendra Nightingale is an Associate Professor in the International Center for Food Industry Excellence
at Texas Tech University. Dr. Nightingale received her B.S. degree in Agriculture and M.S. degree in Food
Science from Kansas State University. Dr. Nightingale completed her Ph.D. and post-doctoral training in
the Department of Food Science at Cornell University. Dr. Nightingale’s research program integrates
basic and applied sciences to understand the molecular ecology and transmission dynamics of
foodborne pathogens along the food continuum. Dr. Nightingale also teaches courses and workshops on
the use of molecular methods in food microbiology.
Molecular approaches to food safety include nucleic acid-based methods to detect foodborne
pathogens and subtyping approaches to discriminate isolates belonging to a given pathogen beyond the
species or subspecies level. Molecular detection assays are routinely employed by industry, regulatory,
commercial testing and academic settings as a rapid, sensitive and specific approach to screen food and
environmental samples for the presence of foodborne pathogens as well as to confirm presumptive
positive isolates. This session will cover the fundamentals of molecular biology and cell physiology as
they apply to development, implementation and interpretation of molecular detection assays in an
academic setting.