People
Principal Investigator – Joao Dorea
Joao Dorea is an Assistant Professor in Precision Agriculture and Data Analytics. He received his BS in Agronomy from the Bahia State University (Brazil) in 2008, and subsequently earned his MS and PhD in Animal Science from the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 2010 and 2014, respectively. In 2017, Joao joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Postdoctoral Researcher, and in 2019, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences at UW-Madison. His research is dedicated to the development and implementation of digital technology and predictive analytics to improve farm management practices. Joao’s research group is particularly interested in applying Artificial Intelligence techniques for high-throughput phenotyping and climate-smart agriculture. They aim to use these cutting-edge technologies to optimize farm management decisions, leading to more efficient and sustainable agricultural practices.
Students
Ariana Negreiro (PhD Candidate)
Ariana Negreiro is a current Ph.D. candidate researching computer vision systems and machine learning applications for dairy cattle management. Her projects focus on individual animal identification, heifer growth tracking, and feeding behavior.
Maria Montes (PhD Student)
Maria is originally from Mexico, where she obtained her BS in Agronomy Engineering from ITESM. During her MS in Animal Science at Purdue, she focused on understanding the data from automated milk feeders. Last January, she joined the lab and is eager to learn more about automated systems and data analysis techniques for precision farming.
Post-Doctoral Researchers
Guilherme Lobato, PhD
Guilherme Lobato is a post-doctorate scholar who’s research focuses evaluating carcass characteristics in beef-on-dairy animals. His project aims to predict ribeye area, circularity, and carcass yield in beef-on-dairy animals. The goal is to develop a tool that can be applied in commercial farms and will help select animals for slaughter and improve the standardization of crossbred Beef-on-dairy animals.
Rafael Ferreira, PhD
Rafael Ferreira is an Electrical and Computer Engineer and a post doctorate in Animal and Dairy Sciences. He is currently interested in developing computer vision systems to improve dairy farm management and phenotyping. More specifically, his research focuses on applying state-of-the-art deep learning methods for dairy cattle tracking and identification, as well as early disease detection.
Alysia Vang, PhD
Alysia is working on using mammary gland ultrasound as a novel predictor for lactation potential beginning at the calf stage. The Hernandez Lab is working with the Dorea lab to use this method as a less invasive model for assessing mammary gland growth and functionality.
Gustavo Mazon, PhD
Gustavo got his PhD from the University of Kentucky focusing on the development of novel precision dairy technologies for cows under heat stress and on developing probiotic intervention strategies for cows and calves under acidosis risk. Gustavo’s current work focuses on assessing technology adoption on dairy farms and creating educational resources to promote artificial intelligence and data technology in livestock production systems.
Visiting Scientists
Luiz Gustavo Ribeiro Pereira
Luiz Gustavo’s projects are focused on precision livestock farming, ruminant nutrition and livestock sustainability. This includes the development of models based on sensors data to predict diseases in dairy cattle, evaluation of precision technologies adoption by dairy farmers, and applications of precision technology to improve and monitor sustainability of dairy farms.
Shogo Higaki
Shogo is a visiting scientist from the National Institute of Animal Health, Japan. He’s interested in computer vision and machine learning technologies because of their potential to maximize farm profitability and animal welfare. During his stay, he is working to advance his research with colleagues and enjoy life in the US.
Research Assistants
Raphael Mantovani
Using math modeling to calculate the respiration rate of lying Holstein cows through RGB and infrared videos.
Previous Lab Members
Enrico Casella (Postdoc)
Enrico Casella is a multi-disciplinary computer scientist specializing in AI applications for precision livestock farming. His research covers animal health, growth, and development. Enrico also explores federated learning approaches and quantitative tissue analysis. Enrico is now an Assistant Professor of Data Science in the Animal Science Department at Penn State.
Tiago Bresolin (Postdoc)
Tiago Bresolin is an Animal Scientist with M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Animal Breeding and Genetics. Currently, he is a Research Associate working with precision phenotyping technologies. He has experience in statistics, quantitative genetics and genomics, multi-omic data analyses, causal inference, high-throughput phenotyping, and artificial intelligence techniques.
Cleydson Silva (Postdoc)
Leonardo Ribeiro (PhD Student)
Joseane Padilha (PhD Student)
Dario Oliveira (Postdoc)
Joseph Caffarini (Research Assistant)
Caleb LaCount (Undergraduate Research Assistant- Farrington Award)
Emily Miller (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
Emily is an freshman undergraduate student in the Department of Animal & Dairy Sciences at UW-Madison. She assists with research efforts through data organization and image preprocessing of large datasets.