Letícia Aparecida de Castro Lara

Currently, Letícia is a Research Fellow in the Roslin Institute/University of Edinburgh, in Edinburgh, UK. She works in the Highlander Laboratory under supervisor of Dr. Gregor Gorjanc, developing temporal and genomic analysis in plant breeding simulations, optimal contribution selection analysis in plant breeding, and genomic studies in insect breeding programs (Black Soldier Fly). She has an undergraduate degree in Biology, and Master and PhD in Genetics and Plant Breeding. The first two degrees were at Federal University of Lavras (UFLA) and the third one was at the University of São Paulo (ESALQ/USP). During her undergraduate and master, she worked with molecular genetics focusing on identification of QTL for disease resistance in common bean. In her PhD, she studied different variance and covariance structures for genetic and residual effects to be applied in longitudinal multivariate linear mixed models in Panicum maximum experiments and, simultaneously, she developed statistical models in genomic selection considering allele dosage for autotetraploid species, with applications in the forage breeding program of the Embrapa Beef Cattle. She was internship student at North Carolina State University (NCSU, USA) under supervision of Professor Zhao-Bang Zeng and academic visitor at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology (Germany) under supervision of Dr. Camila Caldana. She has concentrated her studies in Quantitative Genetics of polyploid species (but not limited to that), Computing for Statistical Genetics (specially in R software), and Mixed Models. Her research interests comprise Genomic Selection, Genetic Mapping, QTL Mapping, and Genome-Wide Association Studies. (Fonte: Currículo Lattes)