Jessica Lowell is from Marshall, Michigan. As an undergraduate at Michigan State University, Jessica majored in Animal Science. While there, she worked at the MSU Swine Teaching and Research Facility for 3 years where her interest in swine management and monogastric nutrition increased exponentially. She also interned with Hord Livestock, a farrow-to-wean operation with about 24,000 sows. There, she was involved in all aspects of operations for a 2800 sow barn. Jessica joined the Stein Monogastric Nutrition Laboratory in 2012 to complete her Master’s degree. Her work focused on determining differences in digestibility between gestating sows and growing pigs. She determined that different energy values for gestating sows and growing pigs should be considered when formulating diets due to differences in digestibility of energy between sows and growing pigs. She also established prediction equations to estimate the digestibility of energy and protein in diets fed to sows.

After completing her MS, in 2014, Jessica began her Ph.D. in Meat Science with Drs. Anna Dilger and Dustin Boler, at the University of Illinois. Her various research projects focused on how pre and postmortem production practices affect both meat and fat quality of pork in three key areas of consumer concern; ingredients in further processed products, antibiotic feed additives, and breed substitution and selection technologies. Her thesis work focused on the effects of sex and sire line on relationships among early postmortem loin quality and aged loin and pork chop quality characteristics. She established correlations between early quality and aged quality and determined whether those relationships were different between sex (barrows vs. gilts) and/or sire line. This data is used by producers and packers to determine whether or not it is necessary to account for sex or sire line when using early postmortem quality traits to estimate aged quality observed by the consumer.

In 2019, she completed her PhD. and accepted a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Meat Science, at the University of Illinois. Her responsibilities were focused on data collection and analysis.

At the beginning of 2020, Jessica accepted a Scientist position in R&D with Nestlé Purina, in St. Louis. Her responsibilities involve leading projects focused within the wet pet food department of the Product Technology Center.