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28th Annual Florida Ruminant Nutrition Symposium, February 6-8, 2017

Speaker Biographies

	Dr. Felipe (Phil) Cardoso is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his DVM and MS degrees from the Universidade Federal Do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and his PhD from the University of Illinois. Since 2012, Dr. Cardoso has established a unique program that seamlessly blends his teaching, extension, and research efforts using a business model to give students opportunities to evaluate dairy farms. His research builds from questions asked by dairy producers and focuses on the impact of nutrition on metabolism, reproduction and health in dairy cows, as well as mechanisms of metabolic adaptation.
	Dr. Joel Caton is the Engberg Endowed Professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at North Dakota State University. He received his PhD from New Mexico State University and completed a post-doctorate at the University of Missouri in 1998. He was a committee member of the National Research Council for the most recent revisions of the Nutrient Requirements of Beef Cattle. Dr. Caton’s research interests are in the area of ruminant nutrition, digestive physiology, and developmental programming in beef cattle. He has published 161 refereed scientific articles and book chapters, 76 proceedings papers, and more than 290 abstracts in scientific meetings.
	Dr. Rich Erdman is Professor of Animal Sciences in the Animal and Avian Sciences Department at the University of Maryland. Rich grew up on a dairy farm near Fort Atkinson, WI. Following completion of his PhD in animal nutrition at the University of Kentucky, he joined the Dairy Science Department at the University of Maryland as an assistant professor in 1979 eventually being promoted to professor in 1991. He served as department chair from 1999-2007. His research has focused primarily on nutrition of the dairy cow with emphasis on the effects of nutrition on milk components. He has published more than 95 refereed journal articles and holds 2 U.S. patents. Dr. Erdman has served as major professor to more than 30 graduate students who hold positions in industry and academia. He has received several awards including the American Feed Industries Award for Dairy Nutrition Research in 1996 and the Dean Gordon Cairns Award from the University of Maryland in 2006. Rich was a member of the NRC subcommittee that wrote the 2001 NRC Nutrient Requirements for Dairy Cattle, 7th rev. ed., the most widely used reference on dairy cattle nutrition. He currently chair of the subcommittee that is preparing the 8th revised edition of the Dairy NRC.
	Dr. Luiz Ferraretto is originally from Brazil where he earned his BS degree in Animal Science from São Paulo State University in 2008. Upon completion of his BS degree, Luiz joined University of Wisconsin-Madison for an internship in 2009 followed by a MS (2011) and PhD (2015) degrees in dairy science with focus on applied dairy nutrition. After the completion of his PhD, Luiz joined The William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute as a Post-doctoral Research Associate. Currently, Luiz is an Assistant Professor of Livestock Nutrition in the Department of Animal Sciences at University of Florida and his research interests are applied dairy cattle nutrition and management with emphasis on starch and fiber utilization by dairy cows, corn silage and high-moisture corn quality and digestibility, the use of alternative by-products as feed ingredients, and supplementation of amino acids and feed additives.
	Dr. Christiane Girard is a research scientist at Agriculture and Agri Food Canada and an Associate Professor in the Department of Animal Science, at the University of Laval, Quebec. She received her MSc (1980) and PhD (1984) degrees from the University of Laval in Quebec. The focus of her research has been on defining B-vitamin requirements of high producing dairy cows to optimize their well-being and metabolic efficiency. More recently, her work has been focusing on the metabolic interactions between folic acid and vitamin B12.
	Dr. Ric Grummer obtained his BS degree in Dairy Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1977) and his MS (1980) and PhD (1984) degrees in Dairy Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After a brief postdoctoral appointment at the University of Illinois, he started as an Assistant Professor in Department of Dairy Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 1984. Since that time, he progressed to the rank of Professor and served as Chairman of the Department of Dairy Science from 2004 to 2010. He was a member of the National Research Council Subcommittee on Dairy Cattle Nutrition that was responsible for writing the Seventh Revised Edition (2001) of Nutrient Requirements of Dairy Cattle. He has received numerous other awards including the American Feed Industry Award (1994), Nutrition Professionals Applied Nutrition Award (2004), and Fellow (2010) from the American Dairy Science Association. In September of 2010, he joined Balchem Corporation as Ruminant Technical Manager. He provides technical service and research and development support for Balchem’s animal health products.
	Dr. Leluo Guan is Professor of Functional Genomics and Microbiology in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science at University of Alberta, Canada. She obtained her MSc and PhD in Pharmaceutical Science from Kyoto University, Japan. She joined the University of Alberta as an Assistant Professor in 2006. Dr. Guan has published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles to date and her research program focuses on bovine functional genomics to establish a link of "omics" with economically important traits in livestock species using transcriptome and proteome profiling through high throughput technologies, elucidating the molecular mechanisms of in host-microbial interactions by studying the associations between bovine gut microbiome and feed efficiency, methane emission and gut immunity development in beef/dairy cattle using metagenomics/metatranscriptomics/functional genomics approaches. She is currently supervising 8 PhD and 1 Msc graduate students.
	Dr. Stacey Gunther is the Research Leader and Supervisory Rangeland Management Specialist at the USDA, Agricultural Research Service’s Southern Plains Range Research Station (SPRRS) in Woodward, OK. He received his BS from Oregon State University (1987), MS from the University of Nevada-Reno (1989), and PhD (1993) from Oklahoma State University. He completed a postdoctorate at the Clayton Livestock Research Center with New Mexico State University. He joined the faculty of the University of Maine in 1994 and in 1996 he moved to the Southwest Research & Extension Center in Hope with the University of Arkansas. Stacey accepted his present position at the SPRRS in 2008. Stacey and his colleagues have authored 91 peer-reviewed articles and numerous proceedings, experiment station articles, research reports, and abstracts. Stacey has actively served the American Society of Animal Science and American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists, and he is an Associate Editor for the Professional Animal Scientist.
	Dr. Jud Heinrichs is a Professor of Dairy Sciences at Penn State University. Jud is a native of Sullivan County New York, where he was raised on a small Holstein farm. Jud has been with Penn State since 1982, initially in an extension appointment and later in an extension/research appointment. His program area is dairy nutrition and management with an emphasis in replacements. Jud's interest in the growth and management of dairy heifers has allowed him to work on several population studies of growth rates of dairy heifers as well as revise the Holstein weight tapes currently used worldwide. He is also a co-inventor of the Penn State Forage and TMR Particle Size Separator. Jud spent his sabbatical from 1991 to 1992 with the USDA, where he was in charge of the National Dairy Heifer Evaluation Project. A second sabbatical was spent at the University of Bologna Italy where he studied effective fiber in dairy cow diets. He has authored over 100 journal articles and book chapters as well as many extension publications, primarily in the area of dairy replacements and forages.
	Dr. Tom Jenkins attended Penn State University for his BS and MS degrees, and received a PhD at Cornell University. After a postdoctorate at The Ohio State University, he then moved to Clemson University where he continued to work on dairy cattle nutrition for over 30 years. Dr. Jenkins taught undergraduate and graduate courses in nutrition and coordinated a research program on use of fat in diets for dairy cattle including basic work on rumen lipid metabolism. He has published extensively in scientific journals and conference proceedings, and has given numerous invited presentations across more than a dozen countries on lipid metabolism in dairy cattle and the practical aspects of fat feeding. Dr. Jenkins has received numerous awards from Clemson University and The American Dairy Association for his research accomplishments in rumen lipid metabolism.
	Dr. Jim Loften received his BS degree from Iowa State University, and his MS and PhD from the University of Georgia. He began his career working in the Dairy Research Department at Ralston Purina Company for 4 years where his duties included conducting research on lactating cows and consulting with dairy farms all over the US and Canada. He moved into sales and nutritional consulting in central Minnesota with the company for 15 years. He then began designing, building and managing large dairies in the Midwest for 5 years. He moved to Milk Specialties Global in 2002 as the Director of Technical Services and Sales where his responsibilities include field technical services, research and development, and sales to large commercial dairy farms in the western US. He has published studies involving lactating cow and calf research, as well authoring an invited review on palmitic and stearic acid metabolism.
	Dr. Philipe Moriel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Florida located at the Range Cattle Research and Education Center in Ona, FL. He received his BS degree in Animal Science from São Paulo State University, Brazil, in 2008. Thereafter, Dr. Moriel moved to the University of Wyoming where he received his MS degree in Animal and Veterinary Sciences in 2010, and then to the University of Florida where he completed his PhD degree in Ruminant Nutrition in 2013. From October 2013 to June 2016, Dr. Moriel was an Assistant Professor and Livestock Specialist with North Carolina State University. In June 2016, Dr. Moriel moved to the University of Florida and his research program focuses on nutrition of cows and heifers during gestation and calf nutrition during early stages of pre-weaning phase to modify offspring metabolism and induce long-term consequences to offspring health, growth, and immunity; strategic supplementation during pre- and post-breeding periods to optimize pregnancy rates and calving distribution of beef females; and identifying cost-effective, post-weaning nutrition and management strategies to develop replacement beef heifers and alleviate calf stress, increase calf immunity, response to vaccination, and value at sale.
	Dr. Jim Quigley is Technical and Research Manager for Provimi North America in Brookville, OH. He leads company activities related to calf and heifer nutrition and management, including research, technical support, product development, marketing, sales, regulatory and quality assurance. He is responsible, with the input of other team members, to establish short and long term strategic direction related to the calf and heifer business. Prior to joining Provimi, Dr. Quigley worked for APC, Inc., Diamond V Mills, and held positions as Associate Professor of Dairy Science at the University of Tennessee and Dairy Nutritionist at Cargill, Inc. Dr. Quigley received his PhD from Virginia Tech in 1985 and BS and MS degrees from the University of New Hampshire. His research has focused on dairy calf nutrition, health and management. He has published over 200 refereed journal articles and abstracts related to the nutrition and health of young calves and heifers.
	Dr. Matt Sellers received his PhD in Animal Science from the Department of Animal and Food Sciences at Texas Tech University with specialization in ruminant nutrition, immunology, and biostatistics. His dissertation work focused on identifying sources of variation in metabolic and immune responses in transition dairy cows. Matt’s has served as southwest National Account Manager for Milk Specialties Global Animal Nutrition for 2 years, with responsibilities in sales, technical service, and research and development.
	Dr. Charles Staples is a Research Foundation Professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Florida. Charlie earned his Animal Science degrees at New Mexico and Illinois. He was hired by the University of Florida as a dairy cattle nutritionist and has served at the rank of Professor since 1995. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate level nutrition courses. His research areas focus on the effects of dietary nutrients on production and reproductive performance of lactating dairy cows and on improving forage utilization by dairy animals. Based upon his research, Staples was the recipient of the American Feed Industry Association Award and the Nutrition Professionals Applied Dairy Nutrition Award from the American Dairy Science Association and a University of Florida Research Foundation Professorship.
	Dr. Diwakar Vyas is a Research Assistant Professor of Ruminant Nutrition in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Florida. Dr. Vyas received his DVM (2003) from College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences in Bikaner, India, and MS (2006) from National Dairy Research Institute in Karnal, India. Dr. Vyas received his PhD in Dairy Cattle Nutrition from University of Maryland (2011). He then moved to Lethbridge Research Center (Lethbridge, Canada) for a postdoctoral fellowship. In 2016 he started his academic career in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Florida where he is working on exploring potential nutritional approaches to improve dairy cattle performance with specific focus on feed utilization, and digestive physiology. Specific research area he is working on includes improving fiber utilization using feed additives and enzymes for better utilization of low-quality forages.