Accomplishments
The American Society of Animal Science honored Ferdinando at Oscar at the ADSA-ASAS 2013 Joint Annual Meeting in Indianapolis. Ferdinando was presented with the Agri-King Outstanding Graduate Student Award, while Oscar because the first student to recieve two ASAS travel awards in one year by winning the the Wilson G. Pond International Travel Award and the Fontenot Appreciation Travel Award. Congratulations, Ferdinando and Oscar!
Personnel
Julio Díaz's last day in our lab was July 31. He is returning to Universidad Politecnica Madrid to finish his Ph.D.
Gloria Casas arrived to spend a year as a visiting scholar. She is on sabbatical from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where she has previously worked with Caroline and Oscar. Welcome, Gloria!
Lab activities
Tanawong finished animal work and statistical analysis on an experiment on the effects of heat damage on canola meal.
Caroline finished animal work for a study of calcium digestibility in fish meal, and finished summarizing the data for that study as well as an experiment to determine calcium digestibility in inorganic and organic calcium supplements.
Jessica started the second half of an experiment to compare DE and ME of feed ingredients in sows compared with growing pigs.
Julio finished animal work for a study on on amino acid digestibility in fermented soybean meal, conventional soybean meal, fish meal, and poultry by-product meal fed to weanling pigs. He also finished animal work and most data analysis for an experiment to determine DE and ME concentration in co-products of threonine and valine.
Oscar finished with the animal work for his experiment to determine DE and ME concentration in DDGS that has been pretreated to improve fiber digestibility.
Travel and visitors
Dr. Stein and the rest of the lab attended the ADSA-ASAS Joint Annual Meeting in Indianapolis starting on July 8. Diego presented a poster, and Yanhong, Tanawong, Oscar, and Neil gave oral presentations.
Dr. Stein traveled to the Colombia Agro Expo in Bogota on July 11-12. He gave two talks, titled "Nutrition of gestating and lactating sows," and "Use of Amino Acids in Diets for Pigs."
Maria Palacios visited us on July 8 and came to our lab meeting to talk about her work in swine nutrition and her current position with Zoetis. Maria was a student with Dr. Easter and Dr. Pettigrew. After the meeting, she sat down for a short interview to talk about her time at Illinois, her career, and how she met Dr. Stein.
With Dr. Easter and Pettigrew, we did a study with soybean meal and raw soybeans. We studied the possibility of feeding animals raw soybeans but that didn't work very well, because there are not just one or two anti-nutritional factors; there are a lot. So you have to cook the soybeans. And I had some chicken data from Parsons as well. I had a paper published in the Journal of Animal Science in 2004 from that study.
After I finished that in 2001, I started doing some research in lactic acid and what happens with lactose in the gastrointestinal tract. We did in vivo studies in the farm, we did some commercial studies in a farm in Effingham, and then we did some lab analysis – we did in vitro lactobacilli and production in plates. And we did some lactic acid analysis in Dr. Fahey's lab, and some PCR analysis in Dr. Gaskins' lab as well. That was my Master's thesis, but we didn't publish it as a paper. I really had to go back to work in Peru, so we didn't have the time, and I really regret that because you have to publish everything you do so people don't tend to forget. Even the University, if you don't publish, they don't have the data available. Hans, before meeting me, knew about my soybean study, because I published it in a journal. So something I would like to recommend to everybody is to publish before leaving the University. Try not to go home before publishing, because things happen and then you don't have the time.
After that, I worked for a very big distributor of pharmaceuticals for animals in Peru. I ended up as the poultry manager and I had a sales team and also technical staff reporting to me. After seven years with them, I was recruited by Pfizer Animal Health as a regional technical manager in the medicinal feed additives for poultry. So I oversee Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Central America, and also some islands in the Caribbean. So it has been a great, great journey. A couple of months ago, in addition to my work as a technical manager for MFAs, they gave me the responsibility as a poultry manager. I basically connect my colleagues from the region to the global poultry organization so we have everything aligned in the whole world in the poultry area.
Dr. Stein was a Ph. D. student with Dr. Easter, and Dr. Easter was celebrating his 60th birthday at the Animal Science National Meeting, and they had a party for him. And since I was recruited by Dr. Easter, they invited me. So I met Dr. Stein there. And he basically is doing kind of the job that Dr. Easter used to do, so he goes to Latin American countries to give presentations, and I meet him whenever we can. He was in Peru once, and we had time to visit.
Animal science is a very nice career, I think. There's a lot of opportunities for nutritionists, and also for animal health experts. And graduating from Illinois will open you a lot of doors.
Maria Palacios (center, orange polo shirt) visiting the Stein lab
We were also visited by 13 students from different universities in China on July 17. They are working as summer interns for Novus.
Publications
Liu, Y., Y. L. Ma, J. M. Zhao, M. Vázquez-Añón, and H. H. Stein. 2013. Retention and digestibility of Zn, Cu, Mn, and Fe in pigs fed diets containing inorganic or organic minerals. J. Anim. Sci. 91(E-Suppl. 2):162 (Abstr.)
Kil, D. Y., J. W. Lee, D. M. D. L. Navarro, and H. H. Stein. 2013. Energy concentrations in distillers dried grains with solubles containing different fat concentrations and the effect of corn oil addition on energy concentrations in diets fed to growing pigs. J. Anim. Sci 91(E-Suppl. 2):582-583 (Abstr.)
Brotzge, S. D., L. I. Chiba, C. K. Adhikari, H. H. Stein, S. P. Rodning, and E. G. Welles. 2013. Complete replacement of soybean meal in pig diets with hydrolyzed feather meal with blood by amino acid supplementation based on standardized ileal digestibility. J. Anim. Sci 91(E-Suppl. 2):585 (Abstr.)
Maison, T. and H. H. Stein. 2013. Digestible and metabolizable energy concentration in canola meal, 00-rapeseed meal, and 00-rapeseed expellers fed to growing pigs. J. Anim. Sci. 91(E-Suppl. 2):676 (Abstr.)
Kim, B. G. and H. H. Stein. 2013. Diurnal variation of amino acid digestibility in pigs. J. Anim. Sci. 91(E-Suppl. 2):686 (Abstr.)
Almeida, F. N., J. K. Htoo, J. Thomson, and H. H. Stein. 2013. Effects of adjusting the standardized ileal digestibility (SID) amino acids in heat damaged soybean meal (SBM) or distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) in diets on performance of weanling pigs. J. Anim. Sci. 91(E-Suppl. 2):686 (Abstr.)
Rojas, O. J. and H. H. Stein. 2013. Effects of reducing the particle size of corn on energy, phosphorus, and amino acid by growing pigs. J. Anim. Sci 91(E-Suppl. 2):687 (Abstr.)
Jaworski, N. W., J. C. González-Vega, and H. H. Stein. 2013. Growth performance of weanling pigs fed diets containing copra meal, palm kernel expellers, or palm kernel meal. J. Anim. Sci 91(E-Suppl. 2):706 (Abstr.)