World renowned poultry science researcher Professor Emeritus Gene Pesti from Georgia recently spent six months at the University of New England, from October 2018- March 2019, as a Visiting Researcher.
Gene has over 30 years’ experience running poultry nutrition experiments and statistical analysis; he has written three books, 200 journal articles and over 100 abstracts and proceedings in this field and has received a number of awards for his expertise.
During his stay in Australia, Gene developed a course on how to successfully run nutrition experiments in pigs and poultry, which Poultry Hub are currently developing into online accredited units and short courses that will be run internationally. This material includes how to design nutrition experiments, characterising and selecting the optimum experimental diets, accuracy of laboratory assays and reporting and presenting results. Gene ran this courses as a 2-day intensive workshop with UNE Poultry Nutrition PhD students and staff, motivating them to think about how industry applicable their studies are, how to minimise the number of birds used in research without compromising the integrity of the data, and how to improve the quality of research outputs.
He also ran one-to-one statistical analysis training sessions and gave advice on diet formulations and how to select nutrients. The sessions were well-received by all and gave poultry nutrition researchers a fantastic opportunity to gain insight into how they can improve their current experimental designs, based on Gene’s extensive experience in this field. We hope Gene will come back again soon!
