Master of Animal Biosciences

My research program seeks to understand the underlying physiology of diseases common in horses, and how these diseases can be modified with targeted nutrition, with a focus on cartilage biology.

It's the data that makes me excited, but what makes me even more excited is when my graduate students come from trying to understand how to put that in the context of our global understanding about dog and cat nutrition and I see them move into a state of excitement over the data.

There is a lot of demand for people with advanced degrees in poultry nutrition. The industry is growing, as you know most people are consuming poultry and poultry will be the most consumed meat in the future. So we really need the scientists to be able to drive that growth in poultry.

The most exciting aspect in my work is to integrate all these new genomic technologies that we have available in order to identify the killer later genes or their functional mutations associated to our economical important traits such as feed efficiency or meat and carcass traits or fertility and reproduction in beef cattle.

One thing I really love about studying cattle is you get to see animals in their environment and then we can take samples and take measurements on these animals and bring it back to the lab and you start to see differences on the tissue and cell level and even down to the gene level.

What we're really focused on is looking at factors that influence that behaviour and then the management factors that are going to influence the expression of that behaviour so we can make very applied recommendations to producers to optimize the health and production of their cows.