Reducing Methane Emissions from Dairy Cattle: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities

Francisco Peñagaricano is an associate professor and the Judge John J. Crown Chair in Dairy Genetics at the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on developing and applying methods to understand, dissect, and predict economically relevant traits in dairy cattle. He focuses primarily on traits that affect the sustainability of dairy farming, including fertility, health, resilience, feed efficiency, and methane emissions. He typically combines large, nationwide phenotypic datasets or field trials with high throughput genomic technologies, and advanced statistical and computational methods to elucidate the connection between genome to phenome. His research involves gene mapping, genomic prediction, multi-omics data integration, and network modeling.