The Department of Animal Sciences is pleased to welcome Visiting Fulbright Scholar Dr. Dinu Gavojdian, coming from the Research and Development Institute for Bovine, Romania. He joined Dr. Adams Progar’s research group to work on evaluating health and welfare in dairy cattle, and he will conduct research at WSU until March 2023.
My area of expertise:
I started implementing research on dairy cattle behaviour since enrolling for my PhD studies in 2005 at Banat’s University of Life Sciences, with the Doctoral Thesis ʻFactors affecting lactating dairy cattle behaviour and welfare during the transition period’, looking at the effects of milk yield, a cow’s age, thermal stress and feeding practices, on time budgets and main behavioural patterns. I started leading projects since 2015, with most of my work being centred around improving ruminant animals’ production efficiency and welfare, under various production systems.
Currently, at the Home Institute I lead a small research group, with our interests being focused mainly on:
- determining whether vocal parameters of cattle and water-buffalo can be deciphered in order to be used as non-invasive animal-based indicators for welfare assessment;
- studying the effects that behavioural reactivity of dairy cattle and water-buffaloes has on production and reproduction efficiency, as well as on animal welfare;
- exploring pathways for the exploitation of sensor data and biomarkers, in order to monitor health and stress, in order to set-up early warning alarm thresholds of poor welfare and disease in farmed ruminants.