ICBF and Sheep Ireland are delighted to announce the winners of the Brian Wickham travel bursary prize to attend the World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock (WCGALP).
1. Shauna Walsh
Shauna is a PhD student in Teagasc and Munster Technological University. The title of her research is ‘Mining of producer recorded data; using beef calf and cow live-weight as a case study’. The objective of the study was to develop a novel editing criteria for anomaly detection of beef cow and calf live-weight data using live-weight data from the BEEP scheme provided by ICBF.
2. Pierce Rafter
Pierce is a post-doctoral student in Teagasc. The title of his research is “Inbreeding in purebred Irish sheep populations”. The objective of this research was to investigate the current rate of inbreeding within a sheep population using Sheep Ireland data to aid in breeding and management strategies.
3. David Kelly
David is a post-doctoral student in Teagasc. The title of his research is “Associations between milk protein polymorphisms and milk production in Holstein-Friesian cows”. The objective of this study was to quantify the association between milk genetic variants for three major milk proteins and milk production traits.
4. David Kenny
David is a post-doctoral student in Teagasc. The title of his research is “Detecting the presence of genomic imprinting for carcass traits in cattle using imputed high-density genotypes”. The objective of the study was to detect single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-phenotype imprinting associations for carcass traits using imputed, high-density genotypes from 23,687 cattle.
5. Fíona Dunne
Fíona is an early career scientist, currently working for Munster Bovine and research based on work while a post-doctoral student in Teagasc. The title of her research is “A decision-support tool to rank growing cattle on expected market value”. The objectives of the study were to develop a framework capable of incorporating both genetic and non-genetic information in order to better predict the eventual carcass value a growing animal. In doing so, herd owners can make more informed decisions when deciding which calves to purchase for growing based on their potential market value.
We would like to sincerely thank Brian Wickham for making this competition possible and for providing this unique opportunity to young scientists to attend the WCGALP conference in Rotterdam this year.
Thank you to all who participated in this competition.