Achieving Change for Animals in Latin America

Ruan Daros obtained a BSc in Agronomy in 2012, a MSc in Agroecosystems in 2014, and a PhD in Animal Welfare in 2019. He is currently a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná – Brazil. His teaching is focused on applied ethology and welfare for second-year veterinary students. Besides academia, his work encompasses the use of technologies to understand how behaviour is linked to disease onset. Ruan’s other research areas include sustainability, wildlife and companion animal welfare, and veterinary epidemiology.

PhD Thesis

Katia Atoji Henrique is a veterinarian from Brazil and she has worked as a professor at the Federal University of Technology – Paraná, Dois Vizinhos Campus (UTFPR-DV) since 2011. From 2020-2021, she was a visiting professor of the Animal Welfare Program at UBC, thanks to Dr. Dan Weary. Katia’s research focuses on Horse Welfare, and she is especially concerned about the well-being of working horses and horses in rodeos. The most recent project that she has been working on is about an app that detects alterations of joint angles according to the weight load and time of work, aiming to prevent lesions.

For her Doctor of Veterinary Sciences degree at the University Austral of Chile, Pilar Sepúlveda-Varas spent around half the time in the Animal Welfare Program at UBC, and worked on improving the identification of sick cows before clinical signs of disease under the supervision of Dr. Nina von Keyserlingk. The remainder of her research was done in southern Chile where she applied similar concepts, but this time, applying them to grazing herds. She currently teaches dairy herd health and welfare to veterinary students as an assistant professor at the University Austral of Chile and is a member of the Animal Welfare Program of the Austral University. She also conducts research to address the connection between the behaviour and health of transition cows in grazing systems.