Petra Kralj Novak was born in Šempeter pri Gorici, Slovenia, on November 4, 1980.

She completed the Bachelor of Science degree in computer science at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana in 2005. Afterwards, she enrolled at the Ph.D. programme New Media and E-science at the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School. She recieved a Ph.D. in 2009.

During her Ph.D. studies, she was research assistant at the Department of Knowledge Technologies at Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and teaching assistant for knowledge discovery related subjects at the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. From 2006 to 2009, she was the secretary and treasurer of SLAIS - Slovenian Artificial Intelligence Society. She was also a program committee member of several international conferences:

• ICDM 2008 - IEEE International Conference on Data Mining,
• PAKDD 2009 - The 13th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,
• LeGo 2008 - From Local Patterns to Global Models - ECML/PKDD-08 Workshop.

Her research belongs to the wide area of knowledge discovery from databases. More specifically, her research is focused on rule induction from class labeled data, where the induced rules are intended for human interpretation. The main application areas of her research are medicine and biology.

Besides the research on rule induction, she also ventured into optimization by designing and implementing a system for optimization of laboratory level traceability of genetically modified organisms.