Maria Devant has a solid background in R&D in Swine and Ruminant Production. Over the last 15 years, she has focused her scientific career in beef production improving feed efficiency and enhancing economic returns while minimising environmental impact, improving animal welfare, and offering high-quality products to the consumers through research and innovation. To achieve this goal the creation and leadership of the Beef Innovation Table has been crucial, in this annual meeting 12 representatives of the whole production chain propose and set priorities of the research topics, and in this forum we also connect them the new societal demands that are coming and that they need to be prepared (like antibiotic user reduction). Her expertise is nutrition and management, and in case a topic needs the expertise in another area we find collaboration within IRTA or outside IRTA to solve it. In the last 5 years she have focused my research in 2 topics: strategies to improve calf vitality and modulation of behavior and stress through nutrition (gut-brain axis). As a result of this work, I have published more than 49 peer-reviewed articles in major international journals (Quartile 1). These publications have a total of 1119 citations yielding an H-index of 21. Besides, in the last 10 years I have presented a total of 80 communications and posters in scientific congresses. Along with this research activity she is head of the Ruminant Production Program (since 2016) and Animal Nutrition Program (since 2021) and member of the Strategic and Scientific Committee at IRTA (since 2019), in these positions where team science needs to be successful, two skills like i) openness to different perspectives and being able to conceptualize the big picture, ii) and being able to uniting people around a common mission are needed.
