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The 74th EAAP Annual Meeting: Award for PhD candidate Wenqi Lou
Wenqi Lou – PhD candidate at Animal Breeding and Genomics (ABG) – received the 2023 Animal Journal award at the 74th EAAP (European Federation of Animal Science) Annual Meeting in Lyon.
Wenqi received the award for his novel research on breeding resilient dairy cows based on rumination data. He defined various resilience indicators from rumination data around calving and calculated their heritability. The most resilient animals had a higher fertility rate, calved easier and had a lower disease incidence than less resilient animals. These findings could be used to select more resilient cows in breeding programmes.
“This was my first international conference,” says Wenqi, who has been working on his PhD at ABG for almost three years now. “I was really surprised I got the award. Or, actually, I got two awards! One is the Animal Journal award, which means I can publish a paper in the Animal Journal for free and I can also join the next EAAP conference. The second award is the EAAP scholarship award, which is a scholarship that the EAAP offers to young scientists to support their participation in the Annual Meeting.”
ABG at the EAAP Annual Meeting
The EAAP Annual Meeting was held in Lyon, the capital of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes French region, from August 26th to September 1st, 2023. The general topic of the conference was ‘Climate change, biodiversity and global sustainability of animal production’.
One of the highlights of the conference is the plenary session, which serves as a centerpiece, bringing together distinguished experts. This year, there was not just one, but two plenary sessions, one of which focused on the ‘Control of Green House Gas emissions in Ruminants farming’. During this session, Anouk van Breukelen – PhD at ABG – gave a presentation on ‘Genetic control of ruminant methane emissions in livestock’.
But Wenqi and Anouk weren’t the only members of the ABG chair group to go to Lyon. A large party of delegates from ABG visited the conference to present their work and listen to the presentations of fellow scientists from all over the world. It was an inspiring event, featuring nearly 100 animal science sessions. “The sessions were very crowded,” says Wenqi. “Sometimes I could only stand in the doorway because there were so many people! But it was actually a good thing because it meant that everyone enjoyed the presentations.”
Congratulations to Wenqi Lou, and thank you to everyone at ABG who contributed to or attended the EAAP Annual Meeting.