Bertrand Bed’Hom (National Museum of Natural History, France)
Bertrand Bed’Hom is a veterinary and geneticist, professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris (France). He worked 15 years at INRAE Animal Genetics division (France), in the field of genetics and genomics of domestic animals, mainly poultry, more particularly on genetic diversity, immunogenetics, domestication and genetics of visible traits. Currently, his research is focussing on population genomics of mammals and birds, and evolutionary mechanisms underlying the organisation of their genomes.
Jörn Bennewitz (University of Hohenheim, Germany)
After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in the Group of Prof. Theo Meuwissen in 2008, Jörn Bennewitz became Professor of farm animal genetics and breeding and Head of department at the Institute of Animal Husbandry and Breeding (University of Hohenheim, Germany). His research is focused on the analysis of genetic variability in pig, dairy cattle, sheep and chicken and the exploitation of this variability in breeding programs. Together with his group members he is working at developing strategies using new technologies for genetic improvement and genomic evaluation of quantitative traits, QTL detection, genomic selection, and genetic diversity.
Henk Bovenhuis (Wageningen University, The Netherlands)
Henk Bovenhuis is associate professor at Wageningen University (The Netherlands) and works in the Animal Breeding and Genetics group as a quantitative geneticist. His research interests range from genomic prediction and genome-wide association studies to the optimization of animal breeding programs. He has a special interest in the genetic background of bovine milk composition.
Rodolfo JC Cantet (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Rodolfo JC Cantet is a quantitative geneticist and professor of animal genetics and breeding at the University of Buenos Aires and PI at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas – CONICET (Argentina). Dr. Cantet has done research on the properties of quantitative genetics models with maternal, competition and crossbreeding effects, and on applications of mixed models, mostly with a Bayesian view. He has published more than 70 peer reviewed publications, supervised four PhD and 15 master theses, and coordinated the graduate program in biostatistics and breeding since 1995. He is responsible for the genetic evaluation of five beef cattle breeds in South America.
Alessio Cecchinato (DAFNAE, Italy)
Alessio Cecchinato is Professor of Animal Breeding and Genetics at Department of Agronomy, Food, Natural resources, Animals and Environment (DAFNAE), University of Padova (Italy). His current research activity deals with emerging issues in genetics and genomics in livestock breeding, such as statistical methods and high-throughput phenotyping technologies (with particular emphasis on infrared-based tools) integrated with genomics for enhancing novel traits associated with animal health, adaptation to heat stress and fertility along with milk-related traits in dairy cattle.
Hans D Daetwyler (Bayer Crop Science, The Netherlands)
Hans D Daetwyler is head of Global Genomics and Breeding Design Vegetable R&D, Bayer Crop Science in the Netherlands. His area of expertise is on quantitative genetics and statistical genomics in plants and animals. His research interests cover a wide field of topics : genomic prediction of traits to genetically improve individuals; quality control, variant (SNPs, indels and structural variants) calling, and use of whole-genome and RNA sequence data; haplotyping and imputation methods; simulation of novel phenotypic and genomic plant breeding programs including modeling of long-term genetic gain and diversity.
Ingrid David (National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, France)
Ingrid David is a quantitative geneticist in the GenPhySE laboratory at INRAE in Toulouse (France). Her research interests are focused on the development and implementation of statistical and quantitative genetic methods to study interactions between individuals (maternal and social effects), genotype by environment interactions (robustness and resilience), high-throughput phenotyping and inclusive inheritance in livestock species.
Ken G Dodds (AgResearch, New Zealand)
Ken G Dodds is currently Principal Scientist in statistical genetics at AgResearch, New Zealand. He has a PhD in statistics with minor in genetics from North Carolina State University. His area of expertise is on quantitative genetics and statistical genomics in a wide range of livestock and aquaculture species. His research interests cover a wide field of topics : genomic prediction of traits to genetically improve individuals, detection of variants, identification and analysis of signatures of selection, analysis of the genetic architecture of complex traits, etc. Currently, his projects focus on genomic selection in sheep, deer and goats and analysis methods for genotyping-by-sequencing data.Andrea Doeschl-Wilson (Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, UK)
Andrea Doeschl-Wilson leads a research group at the Roslin Institute (University of Edinburgh, UK) on mathematical modelling and statistical inference of infectious diseases and other dynamic processes in livestock, with particular focus on dissecting the role of host genetics on these processes. Her research combines methods from mathematical dynamical systems theory and quantitative genetics to understand and predict the influence of genetic effects on the health and performance of individual animals and livestock populations.
Tom Druet (University of Lieges, Belgium)
Tom Druet is Researcher at the Unit of Animal Genomics (University of Liège), and leads the Animal Quantitative Genetics team. He completed his PhD at Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech and worked for four years at the Station de Génétique Quantitative et Appliquée (INRA, France). His area of expertise is on quantitative genetics and genomics applied mainly to animals, in the field of animal breeding and genetics. His research interests cover a wide field of topics: implementation of genomic selection in Belgian Blue cattle; methods for haplotype reconstruction and missing genotype imputation; genetic architecture of complex traits, including meiotic recombination in cattle; characterizing individual inbreeding levels and identification of homozygous-by-descents segments (ROH).
Thomas Faraut (INRAE, France)
Thomas Faraut (INRAE, France) is a computational biologist in the GenPhySE laboratory at INRAE in Toulouse (France). His research interests are focused on the study of the structural variability of genomes, its dynamics within populations and during evolution, its impact on the 3D organization of genomes and more generally on genome function.
Andres Legarra (Council on dairy cattle breeding, USA)
Andres Legarra is a quantitative geneticist with research interests that are focused on the development of mathematical methods for the analysis of genetic variability and management of animal populations based on genomic information and for the implementation of genomic selection. The approaches used include modeling, statistical methods for genome-wide association and linkage disequilibrium-linkage analyses and for the estimation and use of genomic breeding values in farm animals.Daniela Lourenco (University of Georgia, USA)
Daniela Lourenco is Associate Professor in Animal Breeding, Genetics, and Genomics at the University of Georgia in the United States. She has been working in this field since 2004 and her current interests include the use of genomic information to increase rates of genetic progress, the development of methods for genomic evaluations, and the use of computational algorithms to analyze large data. Her research group has been working on genomic selection in beef and dairy cattle, swine, poultry, and fish. They have been involved in the development and implementation of single-step genomic evaluations for several breeding companies and breed associations.
Martien Groenen (Wageningen University, The Netherlands)
Martien Groenen is professor in Animal Genomics at Wageningen University since 2002. He is involved in mapping the genomes of various farm animals since the beginning of the 1990s. He has played a prominent role in the international chicken and swine genome sequencing projects. He was also involved in international projects that sequenced the genomes of turkey and duck. He has coordinated the genomics and bioinformatics work packages in a number of EU funded research projects and his group was among the first to use next generation sequence technology for large scale SNP identification as well as (re)sequencing complete genomes in a variety of farm and wild life animals.
Mathew D Littlejohn (Massey University,(New Zealand)
Matt Littlejohn is Professor at Massey University (New Zealand) and his research interests focus on the development and the use of large-scale functional genomic data sets for the discovery of causative variants in cattle, dog, and other domestic species. A large part of his research is conducted in collaboration with Livestock Improvement Corporation cooperative. Matt’s expertise span bioinformatics and molecular and quantitative genetics, employing techniques such as DNA and RNA sequencing, genotyping methods, ChIP-seq, ATACseq, CRISPR and other methods to identify genes and mutations of interest. Matt has an interest in both Mendelian and quantitative traits, with the ultimate aim of identifying major-effect variants for selection of animals with improved health and performance.
Hubert Pausch (ETH-Zürich, Switzerland)
Hubert Pausch is Professor in Animal Genomics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. The main research interest of Hubert Pausch is in statistical genomics with an emphasis on the development and implementation of statistical and bioinformatic approaches to analyse whole-genome sequencing data at the population scale. His research aims at characterizing naturally occurring sequence variation and pinpointing alleles underpinning phenotypic variation in monogenic and complex traits in livestock populations. Using cattle as an example, he successfully identified allelic variations which have economic and health-related effects.
Toni Reverter (CSIRO Agriculture & Food, Australia)
Toni Reverter is Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Agriculture & Food in Australia and leader of the team “Computational and Systems Biology”. Since he graduated from a B.Sc. degree in Veterinary Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, he has worked in Spain, the USA and Australia. Toni Reverter’s primary research vision is built on capitalising on the post-genomics ‘Big Data’ revolution to improve prediction and management of farm animal performance. His expertise goes from statistics, quantitative genetics and bioinformatics to systems biology and functional genomics. Currently, he develops research projects on efficient methods for utilizing routinely recorded and abundant commercial data in the context of genomic predictions.
Tad S. Sonstegard (Recombinetics, USA)
Tad Sonstegard is an internationally recognized leader in livestock genetics with more than 20 years of experience in the field. Tad has contributed to the sequencing of livestock genomes, development of industry-standard genetic diagnostic platforms and elucidation of the genetic basis for traits impacting food animal health, production, and well-being. Prior to joining the Recombinetics team, he developed and led federally funded projects in applied genomics for ruminant genetic improvement at the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Animal Genomics & Improvement Laboratory. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Biochemistry from Iowa State University and a doctorate in Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology and Genetics from the University of Minnesota.
Ismo Strandén (Luke, Finland)
Ismo Strandén is Professor in Computational Genetics at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) in the group of Animal and Plant Genetics and Breeding (Jokioinen, Finland). He has a wide range of expertise in genetics and bioinformatics, including animal breeding and genetics, animal genomics, applied and statistical genetics, longitudinal data analysis, simulation studies, and Bayesian analysis. Currently, his research focuses on genomic evaluation in dairy cattle, selection for improved production traits and against genetic diseases in various farm species and developing strategies using new technologies for genetic improvement and genomic evaluation of quantitative traits. He has a long experience in developing software used by animal breeding industry for genetic evaluation and pedigree analysis.
Marc Vandeputte (National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, France)
Marc Vandeputte is located in the Marbec Laboratory at the French Institute for Exploration of the Sea (Ifremer), on the Experimental station of Palavas Les Flots, which is one of the largest experimental platforms in Europe dedicated to research on marine and freshwater fish for aquaculture industries and marine biodiversity. Marc Vandeputte’s has been working for more than 20 years on selective breeding of fish (mainly sea bass, carp, trout, and sea bream) in close interaction with the industry and other French (Ifremer) and European research institutes and universities. In national and European projects, he plays a key role in developing breeding strategies for improved efficiency (processing yields, feed efficiency). He has a wide range of expertise in genetics and bioinformatics, including animal breeding and genetics, applied and quantitative genetics, analysis of the genetic architecture of quantitative traits, etc.