Department News and Updates: October 16, 2020

NEWS & EVENTS

• Sea Lion receives fetal brain cell transplantation from pig fetal tissue collected at our Swine Teaching and Research Center. (You will have to type the below into a browser to access link)
  • https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/10/418746/struggling-sea-lions-may-benefit-ucsf-neuroscience-research 
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/science/sea-lion-epilepsy-surgery-cronutt.html
• From the Liu Lab - Graduate students, Kwangwook Kim, Lauren Kovanda, and Monika Hejna attended 2020 ASAS-CSAS-WSASAS Virtual Meeting and Trade Show. Kwangwook won the 3rd place on PhD poster competition.  He presented ‘Effects of very low dose antibiotics on gene expression profiles in ileal mucosa of weaned pigs infected with a pathogenic E. coli’ as poster presentation.

 AWARDS & GRANTS

• Sarah Anderson and Rayann Eaves were awarded a CA ARPAS/LAGE Undergraduate Scholarship for 2020 from the California Chapter of the American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists. The scholarship acknowledges academic excellent and exceptional extracurricular activities. Sarah is an ANS major working as a research intern with Ed DePeters. She is also a student athlete on the UC Davis Cross Country & Track Team. Rayann is an ANS major who was raised on a dairy farm in Maryland. She was a student resident at our campus dairy facility, and Rayann is co-founder of the UC Davis Dairy Club and serves as its first president.
• Undergraduate student researcher, Emma Orth, received the Provost Undergraduate Fellowship Award for her   research focused on "Application of a Donkey Grimace Scale to recognize pain in donkeys (Equus asinus) post      castration”. Her research was published in Animals in the August edition.

SEMINAR 

• Monday 10/19, 12:10-1:00 pm “Life on the ice: What it's like to work in Antarctic “ Anne Todgham, Mandy Frazier, Milica Mandic.

• Tina Horback, Animal Bio PhD student Catie McVey, and Dr. Fushing Hsieh of Dept of Statistics published paper on using  unsupervised machine learning for analyzing livestock sensor data. McVey, C., Hsieh, F., Manriquez, D., Pinedo, P., & Horback, K. (2020). “Mind the Queue: A Case Study in Visualizing Heterogeneous Behavioral Patterns in Livestock Sensor Data Using Unsupervised Machine Learning Techniques”. In Front. Vet. Sci. 7: 523. doi: 10.3389/fvets.