Speakers
Hans Lenstra
Hans (J.A.) Lenstra (17-08-1950) graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 1979 he completed his PhD at the State University of Groningen. After postdoctoral position at the Universities of Nijmegen and Leiden, he joined in 1984 the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University. In 1993 he was appointed Associate Professor. His research interest is the molecular evolution and population genetics of domestic ruminants, which he investigates in close collaboration with several European, Asian and American institutes. Since 1993 he has participated in 7 European projects. Since 2014 he is Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Animal Genetics.
Alex Caulton
I am a PhD student at the University of Otago, in collaboration with AgResearch, New Zealand. In 2018 I completed a Master of Science program in Genetics, endorsed with distinction at the University of Otago. My masters project involved development of a high-throughput, targeted genotyping assay for production relevant traits in farmed Atlantic salmon. My current PhD study forms part of the Ovine Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG) project, which has the key goal of delivering enhanced functional annotation of the ovine genome by generating and distributing curated transcriptome data. This is being accomplished through a collaborative effort, conducting extensive analyses for gene expression, DNA methylation, nucleosome position, histone modification and proximity of sequences in the sheep genome. The component of Ovine FAANG being undertaken during my PhD study focusses on characterisation of tissue specific signatures of methylation at the genomic level in sheep. I am currently based at the University of Edinburgh for four months as a visiting student where I am working with collaborators of the FAANG consortium.
Dan Bradley
Dan Bradley spent his early years on an Irish farm. After a degree in genetics from Cambridge University and PhD in medical genetics from Trinity College Dublin he subsequently started to work on the genetics of each species present on that farm, including Irish humans, and has done for over 30 years. With his colleagues he has combined analysis of ancient and modern humans and livestock to inform on their origins. He pioneered the molecular genetic analysis of Irish populations, particularly co-analysis with surnames. Recent research interests include: human genetic variation and history including ancient DNA; ancient genomes of domestic animals from bones and parchment; the genetics of susceptibility to motorneuron disease; and the genetics of infectious disease susceptibility in cattle. He holds a Personal Chair in the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, is a member of the RIA and is the holder of an Wellcome/SFI/HRB investigator award "Ancient genomics and the Atlantic burden".
Laurent Frantz
Laurent Frantz obtained his PhD from Wageningen University in 2015, and spent three years at the University of Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow. His is now a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. Laurent played a major role in the first analysis of the pig genome, the first recombination map for the pig genome and wrote some of the first papers using large scale modern and ancient genomics to address question related to speciation, and pig and dog domestication. His group is also involved in multiple conservation genetics projects focusing on ungulates species in Island Southeast Asia. Laurent is the holder of two Natural Environmental Council research grants (NERC) and an ERC starting grant entitled: "Linking livestock genetic diversity with three thousand years of agricultural crises and resilience”.
Eve Rannamäe
Eve Rannamäe is a zooarchaeologist, currently affiliated with the Archaeology department at the University of Tartu (Estonia), and the department of Production systems at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Finland). She earned her PhD in 2016 at the University of Tartu with a study on the development of sheep populations in Estonia as indicated by archaeofaunal evidence and ancient mitochondrial DNA lineages. In 2017-2019 she continued her research as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions post-doctoral fellow at the University of York (United Kingdom), where she further investigated the population history of sheep with the methods from whole genome studies and morphometrics. Rannamäe is increasingly interested in applying zooarchaeology and ancient genetics to the study and conservation of present-day native breeds, and exploring the traditional animal husbandry.
Torsten Günther
Torsten Günther is interested in understanding how population change over time and how this process is affected by selection, migration and other demographic processes. He performed his doctoral studies at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, including a long term visit to the University of California, Davis. He studied the demographic history of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and developed methods to investigate the footprints of natural selection on genomes. For his postdoctoral research, he moved to the Institute of Ecology and Genetics at Uppsala University, Sweden in 2013 where he began to study the prehistory of human populations with a main focus on Europe and the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. Since 2018, Torsten is a group leader at the newly founded research program in Human Evolution which is part of the Institute of Organismal Biology of Uppsala University. His group continues to study the prehistory of Europeans and how natural selection shaped populations. Furthermore, he is using ancient DNA to investigate the population history of domesticated animals as a model for population under strong (artificial) selection and with a complex recent population history.
