Bart Pardon
Bart Pardon is a veterinarian, currently associated professor in large animal internal medicine at Ghent University (Belgium). He holds a Ph.D in veterinary sciences (2012), which dealt with “Morbidity, mortality and drug use in white veal calves with emphasis on respiratory disease”. He is a specialist of the European college of Bovine Health Management (2016). Next to his teaching assignment, he is the head of the ruminant clinic. He and his staff offer problem herd solving services to farmers and veterinarians, mainly in the area of calf health and infectious diseases.
His research group focuses on respiratory health, especially in calves, with the eventual aim to rationalize antimicrobial use. Current projects include the development of rapid diagnostic tools, decision support tools and precision medicine applications for bovine respiratory disease. A significant portion of his past and present work deals with Mycoplasma bovis, an interest that awoke from his Ph.D work in the veal calf industry. He is currently involved in the CORUVA project, which aims at genotyping coronavirus strains from cattle and swine, linking them to clinical phenotypes.
Bart attempts to keep close contact with practice, and puts effort in bringing tools with potential to the field, of which nBAL diagnostics and qTUS are two examples.
Kerrie Duffy
Kerrie graduated from the National University of Galway in 2015 with a BSc (Hon) in Marine Science. Before commencing her PhD, Kerrie worked with Inland Fisheries Ireland on the Eel monitoring programme as a research assistant. She joined the Marine and Freshwater Research Centre of Galway Mayo Institute of Technology in 2017 as a PhD student on the large scale interdisciplinary research: “ADIOS: Amoebic Disease Of Salmon” funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. The aim of her research was to elucidate the virulence factors of Neoparamoeba perurans, the causative agent of amoebic gill disease by a proteomic approach.
In February 2021, she commenced her post-doctoral position on a US-Ireland R & D Tri-partite funded research programme (2018US/IRL200). This multidisciplinary project aims to i), investigate the prevalence and distribution of the respiratory microbiome and virome associated with BRDC in beef and dairy herds in Ireland and in beef herds at the United States Meat Animal Research Center (US MARC); ii), develop methods to accurately identify the infectious agents of BRDC using next generation sequencing (NGS), third generation sequencing (TGS), bioinformatics technologies, and high-throughput sensitive and rapid pen-side diagnostics; and iii), elucidate the dynamics of secondary viral and bacterial infection by monitoring experimentally virus infected animals in longitudinal studies (AFBI, N. Ireland).
Edouard Timsit
Dr Edouard Timsit is an Innovation Scientist at Ceva Santé Animale and an Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Production Animal Health, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Calgary and Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Saskatchewan. He is also a diplomate of the European College of Bovine Health Management since 2011 (https://www.ecbhm.org/).
Dr Timsit received his DVM degree in 2006 from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Liège (Belgium). He completed an internship in bovine medicine at the Nantes Atlantic National College of Veterinary Medicine, Food science and Engineering, ONIRIS. He then did a residency for the European College of Bovine Health Management combined with a PhD on Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) and epidemiology at the Nantes-Atlantic College of Veterinary Medicine (France). In 2012, he joined the University of Calgary as an Assistant Professor in Cattle Health, where he developed an internationally recognized research program on pathogenesis, detection, diagnosis and treatment of BRD. In 2018, he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with Tenure and became the Simpson Ranch Chair in Beef Health & Wellness, expanding his research program into other areas of cattle health and wellness. His research work in those areas has resulted in more than 80 scientific research papers and 2 book chapters. In 2019, he moved back to France and joined Ceva Santé Animale, the 5th largest global animal health company, where he oversees pharmaceutical and biological innovations for Ruminants.
Martin Kavanagh
Martin Kavanagh MVB Cert DHH qualified as a veterinary surgeon from University College Dublin in 1993 and spent 14 years in mixed veterinary practice. He is based in Southern Ireland and has worked both on the island of Ireland and internationally in the animal health and agri-business sectors for the last 28 years.
Martin's veterinary expertise is in herd health problem solving, farm system performance management, and system planning and training. He works with diverse farms in Ireland and in Europe developing management systems to reduce antibiotic usage and build resilience.
For companies and organizations, he provides technical and training support. Martin is an effective translator of complex animal health systems and specializes in presentation and communications to a non-technical audience.
Martin has worked at board level in directorship positions, chaired technical and implementation committees, and guided strategic policy for several private and state organisations. He has recently taken up a role as Business Development and Sustainability Manager for Munster Bovine, a south of Ireland based breeding, milk recording and herd health consultation company.
Dorte Bay Lastein
Dorte Bay Lastein is a Danish veterinarian who has worked as dairy cattle practioner for 10 years intertwined in time with a Ph.D. degree in Cattle health and effect evaluation methods using a mixed method approach; both classical quantitative epidemiology and qualitative interview research. Recent 4 years, she has been fulltime employed at the University of Copenhagen as assistant professor. She teaches veterinary students practical herd health consultancy – to focus on the junction between cattle, humans and data of different kinds. She has worked explicitly with both dairy and veal farmers perceptions of reduction of antimicrobial usage for the last 3 years.
Béatrice Mounaix
For 15 years at the French Livestock Institute, Béatrice Mounaix is a project manager in health and welfare of cattle. Her projects in health are usually associated with the National School of Veterinarians in Nantes (ONIRIS) to develop applied solutions to prevent disease in cattle herds and to manage the better use of medication. With ONIRIS-INRAE, she has recently conducted on-farm experiments to better understand the impacts of the vaccination to increase the health of dairy calves or beef calves before fattening.
She is also the pilot of RMT One Welfare, the national network to explore and develop One Welfare in farming systems, and she conducts several projects and training sessions on the welfare of cattle.
https://idele.fr/qui-sommes-nous/detail-departement-service/sante-et-bien-etre-animal
Sébastien Assié
Sébastien Assié graduated from the National Veterinary School of Toulouse (France) in 1997. After a PhD degree from the University of Rennes in 2004, he began to work as an associate professor section of farm animal medicine, in the National Veterinary School (Oniris) of Nantes (France). In 2008 he became a Diplomate of the ECBHM. He is member of the board of the Animal Hospital of the Veterinary School of Nantes, head of hospital for bovines. He devotes half of his time to teach bovine medicine and herd health management and the other half to research on Epidemiology of production diseases in beef herds, mainly on respiratory disorders, in the unit of Bio-aggression, Epidemiology and Risk Analysis, INRAE, Veterinary School. He recently conducted several on farm experiments associated with the French Livestock Institute to measure health status and to understand determinants and indicators of respiratory disorders.
Maria Devant
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.
