Faculty

Research interests include adaptation to environmental challenges, animal behavior, energy metabolism, endocrinology, cell biology.

Kelly Nichols’ research interests include digestive and metabolic flexibility of dairy cattle to elevate understanding of dietary protein and energy interactions, mammary gland metabolism, and postabsorptive nutrient utilization to improve the transfer of dietary nutrients into milk.

Kathryn Teixeira's research interests include evaluation of informal teacher mentoring and in-service in school-based agricultural education, inclusion of students with special needs in school-based agricultural education, and teachers’ use of social media as a means for increased social capital in agricultural education.

Carly Moody's research interests include a combination of applied ethology and epidemiology research methods and statistical techniques to study animal welfare. She has conducted research in a variety of areas including low-stress handling, agonistic interactions in socially housed animals, mitigating procedural pain and stress, and studying human-animal interactions. She conducts research with a range of animal species including companion, farmed, and laboratory animals.

Payam Vahmani's research interests include enhancing the nutritional and health value of animal-sourced foods for human consumption, developing nutritional and management strategies to enhance the level of bioactive nutrients in animal-sourced foods, examining health effects of functional/nutritionally enhanced animal-sourced foods using cell culture, animal models and clinical trials, and studying how animal-sourced foods foster human health (i.e. prevent chronic diseases and nutrient deficiencies), and their role in food security.

Timothy Hackmann's research interests include improving nutrition of ruminants through study of the microbes of the rumen; increasing supply of microbial protein available to animal digestion; discovering biochemical pathways that microbes use to ferment carbohydrates in feed.

I am a geographer and interdisciplinary social scientist focused on climate change, agriculture, and the environment. My research draws on and engages political ecology, geographical political economy and economic geography, science and technology studies, applied ethics, critical policy studies, cultural economy, environmental sociology, and animal studies.

Huaijun Zhou's research interests include molecular and cellular mechanisms of host- pathogen interaction and disease resistance using genetic, epigenomic and bioinformatic approaches in poultry and the functional annotation of animal genomes by integrating ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, Methyl-seq and RNA-seq etc. Graduate Groups: Animal Biology; Avian Sciences; Integrative Genetics and Genomics; Immunology; Microbiology

Xiang Yang's research interests include meat safety, meat quality, shelf life of meat and meat products, postharvest foodborne pathogen control, characterizing pathogen and whole microbial community profiles present in meat production chain, effect of feeding system on degree of antimicrobial resistance and pathogen prevalence in livestock and poultry. Graduate Groups: Animal Biology; Food Science

Jason Watters' research interests include animal behavior, animal welfare, conservation behavior, behavioral assays of animal welfare, environmental enrichment for zoo and aquarium animals, and zoo animal behavior and its impact on zoo-goers.