Imaginings of a Livestock Geneticist

I grew up in the small, rural town of Webster City, located in north-central Iowa. My mom's side of the family had a diversified swine and row crop operation that played a pivotal role in providing me the opportunity to interact with livestock from a young age - even though I was a "city boy"! During high school, I started working at a small family pig farm near my hometown, which set me on the path to where I am today. The farm was a 600-sow farrow-to-finish operation that I worked on during the summer months and weekends when school was in session. After graduating from high school, I attended Iowa State University, where I majored in Animal Science with a minor in Genetics. Throughout college, I had various swine internship jobs and had the opportunity to work at the Iowa State University Swine Testing Station.

All of those long days in the hog barns shaped the type of person I am today. The values and work habits that were "power-washed" into me have transferred to all facets of my life. A few of the values that really stand out and help motivate me are that a day is finished when all the tasks that need to be done are completed, not according to the time on the clock. Some of the work you do may not be the most glamorous or exciting (power-washing barns at the top of the list!), but it has to be done, and if you keep in mind the end result, you can make anything worthwhile.

Very early on, this became apparent when I was working in the farrowing barn and was able to bring a piglet back to life that, when farrowed, was not alive. Most importantly, having worked within the field for many years has generated a great deal of passion in me to ensure that younger kids are able to reap the lifelong advantages that I have benefited from by working within the swine industry. Although I may not have as much of a hands-on feel to the industry as I used to, working on projects that are for the advancement of the industry keeps me motivated. At a time when animal agriculture is being portrayed unfavorably, I hope this provides some perspective on seeing the swine industry in a different light and its impact on a young person's life.

After graduating from Iowa State, I earned a Master's degree and PhD in Animal Breeding and Genetics from the University of Nebraska and North Carolina State University, respectively. I am extremely thankful to my advisors, Dr. Spangler and Dr. Maltecca, who provided me with challenging projects that made it evident to me that I have found my passion at the intersection of animal science/genetics and computer science. As with anything new, I learned to jump into new topics, projects, or coding languages headfirst and try to learn as much as possible. After obtaining my PhD, I completed a one-year post-doc position and then started as a geneticist for Smithfield Premium Genetics. I worked as a geneticist for around three years before transferring to an Analytics role within the Smithfield finance group. The varying roles I've held over the past six years have provided me with a good understanding of the financial drivers of swine production and how they relate to a swine breeding company's selection objectives.

The main reason I created this web page is that I found very little information on "starter code" to get me started on topics such as calculating pedigree or genomic relationships, sorting pedigrees, or other computational tricks. Hopefully, this page will at least provide some motivation for you to jump into learning more about the background on algorithms that make commonly used animal breeding models work, along with a mix of other algorithms. In general I use R and python for the majority of coding projects, but I am profecient in C++, linux and SQL. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please contact me at jeremy.howard06@gmail.com.

Outlined below is a little bit more about my education and publication list from graduate school for some background on my current/previous research interests and the following link is my CV.

      Education

      Publications