CGIL Seminar W2022- Samla Cunha and Kristen Lee

We are happy to have with us Samla Cunha and Kristin Lee, PhD students at the University of Guelph, to present a CGIL Seminar on Friday March 11th, 2022, as part of the course ANSC*6210: Principles of Selection in Animal Breeding. The seminar will begin at 1:30 PM EDT/EST on the virtual platform Microsoft Teams. The title of the papers being presented are:

“Impact of incomplete pedigree data and independent culling level pre-selection on the genetic evaluation of livestock: A simulation study on lamb growth” [Samla Cunha]

"An epigenetic aging clock for cattle using portable sequencing technology" [Kristin Lee]

To join this seminar, please ensure you have downloaded the Microsoft Teams application to your computer, or join the meeting online by using the web browser version of Microsoft Teams. Connection information for the meeting has been sent via a Calendar invitation, additionally the meeting can be found at the link below.

Speaker Biography:

Samla Cunha is a PhD student at the University of Guelph under the supervision of Dr. Angela Canovas. Samla has a bachelor's in veterinary medicine from the Federal University of the São Francisco Valley in Brazil, and a Msc in Genetics and Animal Breeding from São Paulo State University. During her academic career, she has worked with genetic diseases in sheep and dogs, and with conformation traits in dairy cattle. In her PhD, she will study genomic regions associated with nematode resistance in grazing sheep.

Kristin completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta where she received a BSc with honours in molecular genetics. Her experience with the livestock industry began at the University of Alberta where she completed a MSc in Animal Science. Her thesis focused on breeding and genetics in pigs, with the goal to identify the genetic and biological factors underlying meat and carcass quality traits. In addition to her thesis work, she completed an 18-month internship with Hypor Inc., and had the opportunity to work collaboratively with Hypor and Animal Inframetrics on a project that focused on using infrared thermography as a high-throughput measure of animal phenotypes. Through these experiences she learned that she is most interested in using breeding and genetics to find practical and innovative solutions to the present-day challenges experienced by the livestock industry. Kristin is now working on her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Angela Cánovas and Dr. Flavio Schenkel on an MITACS industry collaborative project with AgSights. AgSights provides a genetic evaluation system for beef cattle that is effective and easy to use but it must be updated so that it is able to manage high-throughput data. Therefore, her project aims to update AgSights genetic evaluation system in its ability to efficiently evaluate novel and high-throughput phenotypes, and to incorporate genomic information in the evaluation procedure.

________________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________________