Producing the next generation of poultry scientists is one of the key features of the Poultry CRC‘s education program. An important aspect is to establish close links between our students and industry, which will encourage engagement of end-users in student research projects. This will have a two-fold benefit: firstly, whilst pursuing frontier science, our students will have the future application of their results in mind; and secondly, industry will have ownership of the students’ research and instil in the students industry awareness. The end result is a win-win situation.
In this issue, we will highlight two of our students, Miss Emma Bradbury and Mr Tugrul Durali, who are sponsored by the Poultry CRC and enrolled at The University of Sydney under the auspices of Associate Professor Aaron Cowieson. Both of these promising students have end-user involvement in their projects from the very start.
Emma’s PhD project investigates The calcium requirements in poultry and novel feeding behaviour and has captured the attention of Nutreco, one of the CRC’s partners. “Nutreco is very much interested in Emma’s project as it looks at the combination of behavioural aspects of birds with energetic and mineral efficiency, which is really novel”, said Dr Henk Enting of Nutreco. “We will be interacting closely with Emma during her PhD project.”
Tugrul comes with significant industry experience as he worked with another partner of ours, Red Lea Chickens, for a number of years. Tugrul’s work will explore The comparative digestive physiology and health of conventional and free range birds.
Alltech, a Poultry CRC partner, has a long track record of supporting students around the world and is delighted to be involved in Tugrul’s project. “Alltech has a strong interest in fundamental research for physiology and health of animals, with a downstream application in mind. Tugrul’s project is one such study”, said Dr Andreas Kocher of Alltech. “Despite that Tugrul has only just started his project, he is already working closely with us and is coming to join the Alltech Symposium in Kentucky in May.”
In addition to the one-on-one linkage with end-users, the Poultry CRC also has a “PoultryGrad” program. This program involves organising:
- workshops where our current and past students get together to exchange ideas and mingle with industry mentors and established researchers; and
- field days where our students visit production sites around the country.
