Yanhong Liu has been named the new director of swine research at the UC Davis CLEAR Center in Davis, Calif.
As an associate professor of animal nutrition in the Department of Animal Science at UC Davis, Liu is leading graduate students in their efforts to use nutrition to improve animal welfare and mitigate the loss of young pigs to post-weaning diarrhea.
“Her research is showing the problems caused by this common occurrence, most often arising from pigs becoming infected with the bacterial variant Escherichia coli (E. coli), can be approached through diet. Her work is careful and complex, but her underlying premise is one we can all understand: Make our animals stronger and healthier through better nutrition, and they’ll be better able to stave off illness,” Frank Mitloehner, Director at the UC Davis CLEAR Center said in a release.
Before joining UC Davis, Liu worked with Hans H. Stein at the University of Illinois as a postdoc from 2012 to 2015. Liu’s lab at UC Davis is cross-disciplinary, with a focus on deploying feed-based health technologies to improve animal health.
Her major research interest is to develop new dietary approaches that may promote disease resistance and performance of pigs by investigating the impacts of dietary supplements on gut physiology and immunity and systemic immunity of pigs, especially in post-weaned period.
In addition to receiving the Hellman Fellowship Award in 2019, she also received the National Pork Board Swine Innovation Award in 2012.
Liu received her bachelor’s degree in biological science and master’s degree in animal science from China Agricultural University (China), and her PhD in animal nutrition from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Her research is partially funded by feed and feed additive companies.
