My research focuses primarily on the genetic regulation of innate immunity in animals, with a particular focus on innate immune pattern recognition proteins.
My research program seeks to understand the underlying physiology of diseases common in horses, and how these diseases can be modified with targeted nutrition, with a focus on cartilage biology.
Osteosarcoma is an aggressive bone cancer in dogs and people. My lab investigates the mechanisms that permit osteosarcoma cells to spread to new sites (metastasis) and survive exposure to chemotherapy (chemoresistance). Additionally, we are working on identifying biomarkers that can help predict outcomes and/or guide therapeutic decisions for patients with osteosarcoma.
Studying the behavioural biology of cattle sheds light on how they see and experience the world, and ultimately offers us insight into their feelings. What drives their behaviour? How do the ways that we interact with them, house them, and manage them, impact their well-being? In our lab, answering these questions are fundamental to ensuring that the animals we farm, in this case cattle, live a good life.
My research is focused on developing intelligent robotics systems including Robotic grasping, human-robot interaction, machine vision, machine learning, and embedded computing systems.
My lab studies lung disease in horses, cats, and dogs. We look for relationships between air pollution and the incidence of asthma. As well, we are developing more detailed ways of understanding how lung diseases arise, and finding more accurate methods for diagnosing them.