This webinar features Daniela Demetrio, from RuAnn Genetics, and Marc-André Sirard, with the Université Laval. We hope you will join us on Wednesday, June 7, to hear these two fantastic talks.
Daniela Demetrio, DVM
Daniela Demetrio received her DVM in 1999 and her master’s degree in animal reproduction in 2006 from Sao Paulo State University, Brazil. Her passion for bovine embryo production started in 2000, when she learned to transfer embryos and flush cows in a Brazilian embryo transfer (ET) center. Her first exposure to in vitro embryo production was in 2002 during a training at the National Livestock Breeding Center in Japan. Demetrio received the prize for the best research study in applied science from the Brazilian Embryo Technology Society in 2006 for her work comparing pregnancy results for AI and ET in Holstein cows.
In 2006, Demetrio and her husband Julio were invited to set up RuAnn’s in vitro fertilization (IVF) lab in Riverdale, California. She obtained her California veterinary license in 2011 and American Embryo Transfer Association certification in 2012. She was the chair of the AETA Statistical Information Committee from 2016 to 2022, a member of the AETA Board of Directors since 2021, and currently serves as AETA’s vice president.
As director of the RuAnn Genetics Bovine Embryo Transfer Program, Demetrio is responsible for the production and transfer of approximately 10,000 Holstein, Jersey, and Angus embryos per year, for in-house use, to other local farmers, and to be exported worldwide. Demetrio has transferred more than 65,000 embryos and flushed over 8,500 donors. Practical aspects of her work have been presented at AETA, IETS, and other international meetings.
Marc-André Sirard
Marc-André Sirard graduated in veterinary medicine in 1981 from the University of Montreal. He went into large animal practice before completing his PhD at Laval University in 1986 and has spent all his professional life working in IVF, using a laparoscopic approach to perform IVF in cattle and obtaining the first test-tube calves in 1985 using a clinically usable approach. During his post-doctoral studies in the United States, Sirard co-developed a method to produce bovine embryos by the hundreds using oocytes recovered from post-mortem cows. He came back to Québec in 1987 and obtained an industrial chair to work on bovine oocytes and sperm in 1990.
Sirard founded the Centre de Recherche en Biologie de la Reproduction in 1995, which has grown to include more than 100 people today. He obtained a senior Canadian research chair in 2000, on genomics applied to reproduction, and has created an international effort to define the normal genomic program in early mammalian embryos, which became an NSERC strategic network, EmbryoGENE, in 2008.
He has published more than 325 scientific papers and has been invited to give more than 100 invited lectures at international meetings. His work has demonstrated the value of controlled stimulation of follicle-stimulating hormone to obtain developmentally competent oocytes in cattle. His current research activities focus on the epigenetic mechanism allowing information transfer from one generation to the next. He has been a member of IETS since its first meeting in 1984, organized the IETS meeting in 1999 (Quebec City, Canada), received the Pioneer award in 2018, and has recently served on the Board of Governors (2020-2023).