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The Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding (CDCB) welcomes Ezequiel Luis Nicolazzi to the CDCB team as technical director. "After a lengthy recruitment process, we found the perfect match for the profile that we had established", says CDCB CEO João Dürr. "Ezequiel has the ideal background to fulfill this role. Additionally, he has worked on most areas associated with CDCB activities and has demonstrated strong leadership wherever he passed."Nicolazzi was born in Argentina but completed his studies and spent most of his career in Italy. He has a bachelor's degree in agriculture and master's and doctorate degrees in animal breeding and genetics from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Piacenza, Italy. His Ph.D. thesis was titled "New trends in dairy cattle genetic evaluation" (2010) and his training included periods as visiting scientist at the Department of Primary Industries in Victoria, Australia, and at the Interbull Centre (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) in Uppsala, Sweden.
During his career, Nicolazzi has worked in dairy cattle genetic evaluation at the Italian Holstein Association (ANAFI), as a researcher on cattle genomics at the Italian Consortium for Research and Experimentation in Animal Breeding (CRSA), and as a researcher first and then as Bioinformatics Facility Manager at PTP Science park (PTP) in Lodi, Italy. At PTP, he participated in and coordinated international cooperation projects funded by the European Commission in the fields of genomics, bioinformatics and biostatistics, including the EU-FP7 GENE2FARM, ADAPTMAP and International Buffalo Genome Consortium projects. One of Nicolazzi's well-known developments is the software SNPchiMp, a multi-species database that integrates SNP (single-nucleotide polymorphism) information from diverse sources and formats.
As CDCB technical director, Nicolazzi will lead the CDCB technical staff in delivering genetic evaluations and genomic predictions, as well as summaries of dairy management information for the U.S. dairy industry, including member sectors and allied industry cooperators. He will also work in close interaction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Animal Genomics Improvement Laboratory staff who provide research and development.
The first opportunity for farmers and industry representatives to meet and interact with Ezequiel Nicolazzi will be the CDCB Industry Meeting, to be held at the Alliant Energy Center, in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 4, 2016, where he will deliver the talk, "New challenges in managing SNP data." 9.16.2016
