Research Staff

Research staff working in the ruminant functional genomics lab past and present

Mazdak Salavati DVM PhD AFHEA

After graduating as a veterinarian with a keen interest in livestock data and herd health management, I obtained my PhD in biomedical sciences in 2013 in the UK. I started to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Veterinary College from 2013-2018 in molecular biology and bioinformatics. During this time I worked with variety of livestock genomics research groups across Europe and the United States as one of the bioinformaticians of the Genotype plus Environment consortium. I am currently working as the core scientist within the ruminants functional genomics lab with a focus on projects running as part of the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health and the Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes project.  I have a vested interest in functional programming in R and bash scripting for developing analytical pipelines. My research interests could be summarised as follows: 

• Transcriptomics and allele-specific expression profiling

• Multidimensional data analytics (singular value decomposition)

• livestock informatics and Big Data visualisations

• Distributed computing (High Performance Computing) 

Relevant links

Twitter acount  @MazdakS

Research profile

Genotype plus Environment consortium

Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health

Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes project

BovReg Understanding Cattle Genomes

Shernae Woolley PhD 

I obtained my undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney in 2015, graduating with a Bachelor of Animal and Veterinary Bioscience (Hons Class 1). I then obtained my PhD at the University of Sydney, which focused on the molecular characterisation and management of several inherited diseases in cattle and sheep using SNP-based homozygosity mapping and whole genome sequencing approaches to identify positional candidate genes and likely causal variants. At the beginning of 2020, I joined the Roslin Institute as a postdoctoral Research Fellow in livestock functional genomics. This role focuses on the use of allele-specific expression data to identify variants associated with growth traits in sheep to assist the improvement of genomic prediction accuracy in sheep breeding programs. 

My main research interests involve livestock molecular genetics and functional genomics, and engaging with stakeholders in the livestock industry.

Relevant links

Twitter acount   @shernae_woolley

Research profile