Congrats to DR James Ward on passing his Viva and congrats also to his supervisor David McHugh!
James did his PhD research project at UCD and worked on “High resolution functional population genomics of modern, historical and ancient cattle (Bos spp.)”.
James developed state-of-the-art bioinformatics and computational genomics methods to survey functional genomic variation in WGS data from extant modern cattle populations and paleogenomics data from historical and ancient cattle populations obtained through existing collaborations with archaeologists around the world. Ultimately, the outputs from his research project will generate valuable information for genome-enabled breeding programmes (genomic selection) and provide functionally important natural sequence variants (NSVs) such as single nucleotide or insertion/deletion polymorphisms (SNPs and indels) within bovine genes and genomic regulatory elements (GREs). These NSVs will be useful for genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9 and other tools to enhance production, health and welfare traits in cattle.
Well done James!