Seminar F2023- Dr. Peter Bijma

This week we are happy to have Dr. Piter Bijma, Assistant Professor at Wageningen University & Research, presenting for us on Friday, September 29th, 2023. The seminar will begin at 1:30 PM EDT/EST on the virtual platform Microsoft Teams. The title of the presentation is: “Genetic Improvement of Infectious Disease Traits: Connecting Animal Breeding and Epidemiology”.

 

Speaker Biography: After finishing his MSc, Dr. Piter Bijma started his PhD at Wageningen University, focusing mainly on predicting the rate of inbreeding in selected populations, together with John Williams of the Roslin Institute, who became his de facto supervisor. Since his Ph.D. in 2000, Dr. Bijma has been working on several topics, mostly related to quantitative genetic theory, response to selection and breeding program design. In 2003, triggered by the work of Bill Muir of Purdue University, he started working on Social Genetic Effects (SGE) showing that SGE leads to hidden genetic variation, both in livestock and in natural populations. For this reason, SGE can contribute considerable heritable variation and fundamentally change response to genetic selection, as found for growth rate in pigs and survival in laying hens. Realizing that transmission of infectious disease is a typical case of social interaction, he entered into a very inspiring collaboration with Professor Mart de Jong of Wageningen University & Research. Together, they developed a quantitative genetic theory of infectious disease transmission and statistical methods to estimate the genetic effects underlying transmission. The results show that genetic selection against infectious diseases is much more promising than currently believed.

 

*Recordings of previous CGIL seminars are available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAQ_5WCTMRQ6Gs35yROqGIQ/featured

 

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