People

My main research interest is in the development of novel breeding methodologies and tools.  This work involves a synergy between theoretical quantitative genetics and practical animal breeding.  My main expertise is the application of genomic selection on big datasets for various species (pig, chicken, cattle, etc.) and various models, with emphasis on single-step genomic prediction.

Before beginning my tenure-track role at The Roslin Institute, I served as a core scientist at HighlanderLab under Gregor Gorjanc, and previously as a postdoctoral researcher with Ignacy Misztal at the University of Georgia (USA), where I also earned my PhD in Animal Genetics and Breeding. My experience includes work with Croatia’s national department for breeding value estimation (Croatian Agricultural Agency). I hold an MSc in Animal Genetics and Breeding and a BSc in Agricultural Economics from the University of Zagreb (Croatia). I serve as a member of the Commission on Animal Genetics at the European Federation of Animal Science (EAAP). 

I have a background in animal science and genetics with a BSc(Hons) in Animal Biology and a MSc in Integrative Biology from the University of Guelph (Canada), and a double PhD in Animal Breeding and Genetics from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sweden) and AgroParisTech/INRAE (France).  I completed postdoctoral training at Uppsala University (Sweden), Wageningen University (the Netherlands) and the University of Guelph before becoming a Core Scientist in the Pocrnic Lab.

My research interests include working with genomic data to study genetic diversity and adaptation.  I have worked on a variety of domestic species including Atlantic salmon, sheep, chicken, pig, turkey and dairy cattle, and have over 13 years of research experience resulting in over 30 coauthored peer-reviewed publications, conference papers, and technical reports for the animal breeding industry.

I hold academic training in animal breeding and genetics, with an emphasis on quantitative traits. Focusing on the genetic improvement of populations, my previous research projects have included predicting breeding values, estimating genetic parameters, and comparing statistical models. I have also worked on analysing the genetic architecture of complex traits and evaluating the effect of causative variants on the accuracy of (genomic) estimated breeding values.

I am currently developing and implementing a breeding programme for artemia farming and pioneering scalable, affordable, improved and sustainable artemia cysts for the aquaculture hatchery industry.

I completed my previous studies at the University of Guelph, where I obtained a BSc(Hons) in Animal Biology and a MSc in Animal Breeding and Genetics. During my Master’s degree, I estimated genetic parameters and predicted breeding values for feed efficiency traits in Canadian dairy calves. As a PhD student, I am investigating how incorporating genomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic data enhances the accuracy of genomic prediction and precision selection in pigs. This research is funded through the EastBio Doctoral Training Partnership with support from a commercial partner.

I completed my BSc (Hons) in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Dundee, where my honours project examined the phylogenetics of autophagy genes across Amoebozoa. I am currently an MSc Bioinformatics student at the University of Edinburgh, carrying out my research project at the Roslin Institute under the supervision of Dr Chrissy Rochus and Dr Ivan Pocrnić. My project characterises the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class region in Chillingham wild cattle, an isolated and historically inbred population, using PacBio HiFi long-read sequencing. The work covers de novo assembly with hifiasm, assembly evaluation with QUAST and BUSCO, read alignment with bwa-mem2 and minimap2, and small and structural variant calling with DeepVariant, Sniffles2, and bcftools, implemented as a Snakemake pipeline on the Eddie HPC cluster. My broader interests are in long-read sequencing and genetics, particularly how haplotype-resolved assemblies can resolve complex genomic regions.

Thesis project: Resolving the structure and diversity of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) regions in the Chillingham wild cattle using PacBio HiFi long-read sequencing