Animal Science graduate student Cindy Batchelder was awarded the Hertzendorf Award by the Physiology Graduate Group at its annual Spring Colloquium. The Hertzendorf Award rewards scholarship and good citizenship. Cindy is working on a doctorate in reproductive physiology under the mentoring of Professor Gary Anderson. She is responsible for Rosie, the cloned calf (see note below).

Marcelo Bertolini was selected as recipient of the Loren Carlson Award in Physiology.  The award goes to the Physiology student whose Ph.D. thesis is judged to be the best among those submitted during the year across the entire UC Davis campus.  Marcelo's research was designed to determine why some calves produced by in vitro fertilization procedures have excessively high birth weights.  In addition to a plaque on display in the Carlson Health Sciences Library, Marcelo received a stipend award.

Sara Shields, an Animal Behavior Graduate Group Ph.D. student working in the laboratory of Dr. Joy Mench, won the award for best graduate student paper at the 36th international congress of the International Society for Applied Ethology in Egmond-Am-Zee, the Netherlands.

Cloned Calf Doing Well

The Department of Animal Science celebrated the birth of a cloned calf on May 2, 2002.  The calf named Rosie, was produced by removing the genetic material (contained in the nucleus of a cell) from a cell taken from a Hereford cow and inserting the nucleus into an unfertilized egg of another cow. The resulting embryo transferred to the reproductive tract of a third cow that carried the pregnancy to term. 

Rosie was born as part of Physiology Ph.D. student Cindy Batchelder's graduate research designed to study the effects of different cell types on the success of the cloning procedure. On September 12, another cloned calf, Ruby, was born from a different cell type from the same cow, making Rosie and Ruby identical twins and clones of the original donor cow. Rosie appears to be normal and has gone to live in Petaluma at Pfendler Ranch, which supported the cloning research and owns the donor cow. Ruby will remain on campus for several weeks while data on cloned calves is collected, and then she will join Rosie and the donor cow at Pfendler Ranch