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.
Leonel Leal
Leonel Neto Leal was born on April 18, 1986 and grew up in Paços de Ferreira, Portugal. He obtained his BSc in Zootechnical Engineering at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD), Vila Real, Portugal. After his graduation in 2008, he started his MSc in Zootechnical Engineering at the same University. His major specialization was animal production and nutrition, and for his major thesis, he investigated the effect of high planes of milk replacer feeding on growth performance and general health status of rearing calves at the Ruminant Research Centre of Nutreco in Boxmeer, the Netherlands. In January 2011, after obtaining his MSc, Leonel joined Nutreco as a ruminant researcher. In 2019, he obtained his PhD in Animal Nutrition at Wageningen University & Research (Wageningen, the Netherlands), focusing on improving meat colour and oxidative stability of lamb meat by dietary antioxidant supplementation. Apart from his PhD appointment, for the past 7 years, Leonel has been focusing as well on the functional nutrition of calves, where he has been leading the LifeStart science platform within Nutreco R&D.
Lautaro Rostoll Cangiano
I am Lautaro Rostoll, a PhD candidate in the Steele lab at the University of Guelph, Canada. I study gut physiology and immunology of dairy calves. Specifically, my work focuses on understanding how changes in microbial colonization of the gut affects immune development, health, and metabolic function.
David Kenny
Professor David Kenny is Head of the Teagasc Animal and Bioscience Research Department. He has over twenty years of research experience in the biological control of a range of economically important traits to ruminant livestock production systems, including growth and reproductive efficiency, ruminal methanogenesis and the development and functionality of the rumen microbiome. His work is based on in-depth study and the application of state-of-the-art physiological and molecular approaches to these complex, multidimensional traits. He has led a number of large multi-partner research projects and has supervised the studies of 18 Ph.D. and nine M.Sc. students to completion, as principal supervisor. His research has resulted in the publication of in excess of 190 full length internationally peer reviewed scientific manuscripts and book chapters to-date, as well as many industry targeted technical reports. He is the president of the Physiology Study Commission of the European Association of Animal Production, is a trustee of the British Society of Animal Science (BSAS), and is a member of the management board of the international scientific journal, Animal. He was awarded the prestigious Hammond award by BSAS in 2018 in recognition of outstanding contribution to an improved understanding of how nutrition affects the complex underlying biology regulating economically important traits in cattle, including feed efficiency, rumen methane emissions and male and female reproduction.
He runs a beef and sheep farm in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland and is integrally involved and is well known within the beef cattle sector in Ireland.
Alan Kelly
2002-2006: B.Agr.Sc - University College Dublin - Animal Science.2006-2009: PhD - University College Dublin - Nutritional Physiology. PhD thesis: An examination of the biological control of energetic efficiency in beef cattle. 2010-2011: Post-doctural Scientist - University College Dublin - Ruminant Nutrition.2011-present: Lecturer in Animal Science - School of Agriculture and Food Science, University College Dublin.
Marcio Duarte
Marcio Duarte was born in Viçosa, a college town located at southeast in Brazil. Marcio comes from Universidade Federal de Viçosa in Brazil where he was a three-time grad in Animal Science. His Masters and Ph.D was focused on Meat Science and Muscle Biology in ruminant animals. During his Ph.D he was a visiting scholar at the Nutrigenomics and Growth Biology Laboratory at Washington State University (2011-2012).
After his Ph.D, he joined the Department of Animal Sciences at Universidade Federal de Viçosa as a posdoctoral fellow. Upon completion of his postdoctoral fellowship, Marcio joined the same Department as Assistant Professor, where he stayed for seven years. He joined the Department of Animal Biosciences at University of Guelph in 2021 as Assistant Professor in Meat Science and Muscle Biology. His area of research focuses on skeletal muscle growth and metabolism both pre and post-natally and its overall impact on the quality of meat.
