Alan L. Archibald is Head of the Division of Genetics and Genomics at The Roslin Institute and Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh.  Professor Alan Archibald is internationally recognised in the field of farm animal genetics and genomics research.  He co-led the first international farm animal genome project – PiGMaP.  Together with Professor Chris Haley he was awarded the Royal Agricultural Society of England’s Research Medal in 1997 for research work of benefit to agriculture.  He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Swine Genome Sequencing Consortium that is promoting efforts to sequence the pig genome and chair of the Governing Council of the European Animal Disease Genomics network of Excellence for Animal Health and Food Safety.
His research is concerned with understanding the genetic control of complex traits, including production efficiency, product quality and host response to infectious disease, mainly in pigs and cattle.  His current research of relevance to this conference includes dissecting the genetic control of predisposition to boar taint.
He holds an Honorary Professorship in the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh is as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh which is Scotland’s National Academy of Science and Letters.

Rick D’Eath studied Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford in 1993 where he stayed on to do his DPhil "Social recognition of flock mates in laying hens" supervised by Marian Dawkins. Rick then worked as a post-doctoral research scientist at SLU in Sweden with Linda Keeling before taking up his present position, in 1997 as a Behavioural Scientist in Alistair Lawrence’s team at SAC in Edinburgh.  Rick is interested in behaviour as a way of measuring animal welfare, and to understand and solve welfare problems which involve behaviour in farmed livestock. His research has focussed on measuring animal welfare, for example by using animal’s preferences and motivation for different resources. Another major area of interest is developmental and genetic aspects of animal temperament, particularly the aggressive social behaviour of pigs at mixing.

Ivan Dimitrov (PhD) works as a team leader in the field of ruminant welfare and breeding, head of the Department of Sheep Breeding and Technologies at the Agricultural Institute, Stara Zagora, Bulgaria. After graduating in 1987, he worked at the same institute conducting research on behaviour of sheep and cattle, and milking biology of ruminants . He became a Senior researcher in 2003. His research is focused on the assessment of emotional reactivity in animals, the balance between stress and positive emotions and relations with production, studies of different biological characteristics (behavioural, physiological, hormonal, immune etc.) in sheep with different emotional reactivity. He is a member of the Management Committee of the European Programme Cost Action 846 - ASSESSMENT AND MONITORING OF THE ANIMAL WELFARE. National team leader and coordinator of the animal welfare research in Bulgaria. Co-founder and member of the management committee of the Stara Zagora Sheep Association. He has published more then 70 scientific articles and lectures for dairy practice.

Gary Evans gained his PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Liverpool in 1993.  He joined the Dalgety group of companies in 1995 and has held several positions through its evolution into PIC International Group, Sygen International and now, Genus plc. He has been involved in and led various research projects relating to Meat Quality, Disease Resistance and Marker Assisted Selection, managing the company’s UK research laboratory from 2001 – 2004. More recently, he has taken up a position at PIC Europe Headquarters (Oxfordshire, UK) supporting biotechnology developments and positioning the value of biotechnology within commercial operations.
Genus, a FTSE250 listed company, is one of the worlds largest bovine and porcine breeding businesses through its ownership of ABS and PIC. Together these companies deliver genetic improvement to cattle and pigs in more than 70 countries around the world.

Eli Grindflek (PhD) is a Senior Scientist in Norsvin, the Norwegian Pig Breeders Association, and she is located at Department of Animal and Aquaculture Sciences at University of Life Sciences in Ås, Norway. Her scientific interests have mainly been in mapping and characterisation of major genes affecting meat quality, including genes involved in fat metabolism, and different types of hernia and chryptorchidism. The last four to five years, however, the research focus has been headed towards genetics of boar taint. Her current research includes characterisation of candidate genes and association studies, gene and allele expression profiling, mapping genes and functions, combining data on gene expression and biological pathways with genome mapping, and genomic selection.
She is currently project leader in the projects ”Genetics of Boar Taint”, “Fine mapping and molecular characterisation of quantitative trait loci (QTL) affecting hernia in pigs”, and ”Genome-wide approaches to the genetic improvement of cattle, pigs and salmon”.

Per Jensen has been a professor of ethology at IFM Biology, Linköping University in Sweden since 2002. After graduating in 1983, he worked at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences until 2002, conducting research on behaviour of pigs and chickens. He became a full professor in 1988. His research is focused and the biology of domestication, and over the last ten year period he has focused on the genomics of behavioural adaptations during domestication, using chickens as the prime model species. He also teaches basic genetics and courses in animal behaviour at all university levels. The Applied Ethology Group, of which he is the leader, contains about ten persons working with various aspects of behaviour and genomics. Per Jensen has been the chairman of the EU-commission’s Scientific Committee for Animal Welfare, and is Editor-in-Chief of Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

Claus B. Jorgensen obtained his MSc in Agricultural Sciences at The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (RVAU), Denmark in 1991. He was awarded his PhD in 1997 on research related to genome analysis in both cattle and pigs. The PhD study was carried out both at the BBSRC Babraham Institute, UK and at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, Denmark. Claus B. Jorgensen held different post doc positions at RVAU between 1997 and 2003 and in 2003 he got a position as associate professor in genetics at RVAU. In 2005 he was a vising professor at ETH in Zürich, Switzerland. Presently he is associate professor at University of Copenhagen.
During his career Dr Jorgensen has focused on genomics and inherited diseases in relation to domestic animals, mainly pigs and cattle. His fields of expertises are DNA-variation, linkage mapping, comparative mapping, gene expression and mutation detection. He has published 40 peer-reviewed papers and obtained funding for his research from the Danish research councils, the European Commission and the breeding industry.

Béatrice de Montera is a PhD student in Genomics at Laboratory of Developmental Biology and Reproduction of INRA, Jouy-en-Josas. She has studied for 4 years the molecular basis of genetic identity and epigenetic variability in adult bovine clones from INRA. She has been a lecturer for 5 years at the National Museum of Natural Science in Paris. As she has both biological and philosophical background, she is doing a second PhD, in parallel, in Ethics and Philosophy of Science at the Sorbonne University, Paris. She has been Bioethics lecturer for 6 years in several Institutes. She has been the Project manager for an in-house Ethics seminar: “Animals in Research and Ethics” at the INRA centre at Jouy-en-Josas for 2 years.

Pierre Mormède (DVM, PhD) has been Research Director at the French National Institute for Agronomical Research (INRA), Adjunct-director of the laboratory PsyNuGen since 2007 (INRA, CNRS, Bordeaux University), coordinator of a research group on molecular genetics of stress responses and their physiopathological consequences.  His field of interest is the search for molecular bases of genetic differences in behavioural and neuroendocrine stress responses as related to the physiopathology of stress-related disorders such as obesity or substance abuse, as well as farm animal production and product quality, using QTL analysis, genomics and candidate gene studies. Research is performed using mice and rats as model organisms as well as in pigs and humans.  He has published more than 200 papers in international refereed journals, one book as a co-editor, and 12 book chapters. Dr Mormede is on the editorial board of Psychoneuroendocrinology, Genes Brain and Behavior, Journal of Individual Differences, Physiology and Behavior; and the Editorial advisory board of Behavior Genetics.

Peter Sørensen works as a Senior Scientist at the Department of Genetics and Biotechnology at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has a M.Sc. degree in animal sciences (1996) and a PhD degree in statistical genetics (2000) from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University. During his PhD and a 2 year post doc at Virginia Tech, USA he worked on QTL mapping in livestock population and developed computer programs used for fine-mapping of genes in cattle and pig populations. Currently his major focus area is implementing statistical and systems biology approaches for the analyses of transcriptomic and genetical genomics data. He has also developed an R software package for eQTL mapping in F2 population. He is collaborating with several research groups on the statistical and bioinformatic analysis of their large-scale genomic data.

Dawit Tesfaye (PhD) works as a team leader in the field of Bovine Embryo Genomics in the Institute of Animal Science, Department of Animal Breeding and Husbandry Group at the University of Bonn, Germany. After completing his B.Sc. studies in Ethiopia in 1990, he joined the University of Bonn to do his M.Sc. and PhD studies (1998 – 2003) in the field of Animal Production Systems and Molecular Genetic Analysis of Bovine Embryos, respectively. His field of interest is understanding the molecular genetic differences of bovine oocytes or embryos with varying developmental potential to generate candidate genes related to oocyte or embryo developmental competence. Since 2004 he has actively worked on the identification, expression profiling and functional analysis of genes in bovine oocytes and preimplantation embryos using large-scale transcriptome approaches. He also focuses on functional analysis of specific genes using RNAi technology. More recently he has become interested in investigating the expression and role of microRNAs in bovine embryogenesis.

Niels Tommerup is the Director of the Wilhelm Johannsen Centre for Functional Genome Research at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.  He has also worked at the J. F. Kennedy Institute in Glostrup, as a Senior Research Officer in the Depart¬ment of Pathology at the Newcastle Mater Mise¬ricordiae Hospital in Australia, and as a Consultant in the Depart¬ment of Medical Genetics at Ullevaal University Hospital in Norway. 
His scientific interests include: isolation of disease genes by positional cloning/positional candidate gene strategies, by identification and exploitation of disease-associated translocation-breakpoints (Mendelian Cytogenetics) and by combining data on gene expression and biological pathways with genome mapping; mapping of gene expression/function during normal and abnormal fetal development and during oncogenesis; gene expression in relation to genomic imprinting/chromosomal structure/position effects; functional studies of non-coding RNA genes; disorders in the brain displaying comorbidity. He was the coordinator of the EU-concerted action Mendelian Cytogenetics Network (Biomed 2: 1997-2000).   Prof. Tommerup has a longstanding track-record in the use of structural chromosomal rearrangements for identification of protein-coding genes associated with developmental disorders and genetic mechanisms, including epigenetic modifications and long range position effects.

Roel Veerkamp is a Group leader in the Animal Breeding and Genomics Centre, Genetics and Biodiversity of Animal Production Division.  From 1991-1997 he worked at the Scottish Agricultural College (SAC) in Edinburgh, UK.  Since 1997 he has worked within the Animal Science Group, Wageningen UR as a DLO Researcher, then a Senior DLO Researcher in the Animal Science Group, becoming Head of the Animal Genetics & Biodiversity Group in 2002. His research over the last five years has focused on numerical methods to improve the application of animal breeding (including genomics information), negative effects of selection for dairy type, implementation of body condition score for genetic selection in many countries, quantitative genetics model to test subjectivity of data recording, an alternative method for longevity analysis, investigation of GxE and robustness, and the first multitrait and multidimensional random regression model.  He is the Co-ordinator of the EU project “RobustMilk2", a SABRE Board member, and project leader from projects on “Risks of a high milk production”, “Genomic selection”, and “Breeding objectives and breeding value estimation for Irish Cattle Breeding Federation.”

Johanna Vilkki has been the leader of the Animal Genomics research team at MTT Agrifood Research Finland since 1993. The team that today includes 11 scientists and 5 technicians, has been working in the fields of genetic mapping and dissection of quantitative and qualitative trait loci of economic importance in livestock (cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry), analysis of genetic diversity, as well as developing embryo technologies. The results have already led to practical tools for selection against genetic defects in cattle, pigs and chicken and patent applications. Her research has involved extensive international collaboration (e.g. as the coordinator for the EC FP5 project MASTITIS RESISTANCE). She has published more than 60 articles in international refereed journals.

Chris Warkup is an Animal Scientist with over 20 years experience in the animal breeding industry and research within the UK Meat and Livestock Commission. He was seconded from the UK’s Meat and Livestock Commission to be the Chief Executive of Genesis Faraday Partnership in 2003. Chris is; i) Coordinator of the EU SABRE Integrated Project, ii) Chairman of Genomia Management Ltd, a high-risk seed investment fund, and iii) a Trustee of the Roslin Foundation (formerly the charity board of the Roslin Institute). Chris is also a member of several Research Council and Government Committees, including being a member of the BBSRC Sustainable Agriculture Strategy Panel and the UK Standing Committee of Farm Animal Genetic Resources. In recent years, Chris has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Sustainable Farm Animal Breeding and Reproduction Technology Platform (FABRE-TP), including being a member of the Working Group that coordinated the Vision 2025 document and the Strategic Research Agenda for the Technology Platform.