Research

The research program focuses on understanding and enhancing nutrient utilization efficiency, via nutritional strategies, with the aim to improve the sustainability of livestock systems. With the strong focus on ruminants in the short to medium term, the group’s work is facilitated by core research platforms and competence centers at ETH Zurich, such as AgroVet-Strickhof and World Food System Center (WFSC). Our goal is to establish and implement hypothesis-driven experimental research to investigate the digestion, metabolism, and utilization of nutrients of farm animals to characterize, test and improve different feeding strategies. The group also develops and implements novel data-driven methods to better understand nutritional physiology and to improve the welfare of farm animals, with the collaborations of Zurich Exhalomics, Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) and the Euler High Performance Computing cluster for data analysis. This research group is well positioned to integrate and translate these findings with the dairy farming systems in Switzerland and worldwide, in order to support farmers to make better decisions and improve farm sustainability.

Main research foci:
• To mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from animals
• To improve efficiency and quality of animal-source food production
• To counteract the impact of climate change on animals
• To develop novel approaches for the monitoring and improvement of animal welfare