Ben Hayes

Centre Director, Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation, University of Queensland, Australia

Talk Title: “Chromosome Segment Stacking for Accelerated Genetic Gain and Maintaining Genetic Diversity in Crops and Livestock”

Professor Hayes has extensive research experience in genetic improvement of livestock, crop, pasture and aquaculture species, with a focus on integration of genomic information into breeding programs, including leading many large scale projects which have successfully implemented genomic technologies in livestock and cropping industries. Author of more than 300 journal papers, including in Nature Genetics, Nature Reviews Genetics, and Science, contributing to statistical methodology for genomic, microbiome and metagenomic profile predictions, quantitative genetics including knowledge of genetic mechanisms underlying complex traits, and development of bioinformatics pipelines for sequence analysis.

Ben Hayes will be presenting at PAG Australia, Thursday, September 21, at 8:45 AM

Jennie Pryce

Professor/Research Director, Agriculture Victoria Research and La Trobe University, Australia

Talk Title: “The Methane Challenge - Selecting for Low Emitting Dairy Cow"

Professor Jennie Pryce is a geneticist who is well known for her work in dairy genetics and genomics. Jennie is Research Director for Agriculture Victoria Research and a Professor of La Trobe University.Jennie has dedicated her life to dairy herd improvement and is passionate about research. She grew up on a dairy farm in Shrewsbury (UK (United Kingdom) where at an early age she bred pedigree Holstein dairy cattle under Severnvale Holsteins prefix. Jennie received her BSc (Hons) first class and PhD from The University of Edinburgh (UK). Prior to her work in Australia, she was employed as a dairy geneticist by the Scottish Agricultural College (UK) and as a scientist by the dairy breeding company Livestock Improvement Corporation (New Zealand). In 2008 Jennie made Melbourne her home and started a research position with the Department of Primary Industries (now Agriculture Victoria Research) Read More

Jennie Pryce will be presenting at PAG Australia, Thursday, September 21, at 8:45 AM

Olga Dudchenko

Assistant Professor, Mol. & Human Genetics/Aiden Lab, Baylor College of Medicine, USA

Olga Dudchenko received her PhD from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher with Dr. Erez Lieberman Aiden at the Center for Genome Architecture, Baylor College of Medicine. Olga is the author of several widely used tools for genome assembly including 3D-DNA, an automated pipeline for using Hi-C data to assemble genomes, and Juicebox Assembly Tools, a system for the visual exploration of Hi-C data which provides a point-and-click interface for using Hi-C heatmaps to identify and correct errors in genome assemblies. She is a cofounder of DNA Zoo (www.dnazoo.org), a consortium focused on facilitating conservation efforts through the rapid generation and release of high-quality genomics resources.

Workshop Title: "Genomics & Biodiversity"

Biodiversity genomics is a fast-growing field of study that describes biological variation in all its dimensions from the foundational DNA layer to organisms and ecosystems, phylogeny and function. Genomics, the comprehensive study of an organism’s genome, unifies and empowers all biological sciences. The integration of genomic science, methods, tools, applications, and findings are having measurable impacts on research across the tree of life and will engender an array of collaborative and multidisciplinary projects of wide scientific and public interest, as well as biomedical, agricultural, industrial, and societal importance. Advances in genomics are enhancing our knowledge of the earth’s biological diversity and will lead to new discoveries that will benefit current and future human societies. Read More