Neonatal Microbiome and Immune Priming in Livestock Animals
The Livestock Microbiomes lab focuses on understanding how the early-life microbiome shapes immune development and long‑term health in ruminants. The goal of this work is to identify microbial and metabolic signals that drive resilient immune development and enhance cattle health, enabling evidence‑based strategies to optimize calf management, and improve lifetime productivity.

Omics in Livestock Animal Research
We focus on optimizing and validating multi‑omics tools for low‑microbial‑biomass samples, where contamination and signal‑to‑noise challenges can limit analytical accuracy. We develop and refine workflows for nucleic‑acid extraction, library preparation, and contamination control, with the goal of improving sensitivity, reproducibility, and biological interpretability of neonatal microbiome data. This work enables more reliable characterization of early‑life microbiomes and host-microbe interactions in systems where microbial load is inherently low.

Development of Microbiome-Based Interventions
Moving beyond exploration toward translation, our work focuses on designing microbiome‑based interventions that target early life the critical “window of opportunity", to enrich microbial and immune development in neonatal calves.