Cecilia Constantino Rocha, assistant research professor in livestock systems in the Division of Animal Sciences , was named the recipient of the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) Young Scholar Award.

As a component of her award, Rocha will present her talk, “The importance of estrus expression and endometrial function for the pregnancy success in beef cattle” at the ASAS Annual Meeting.

Rocha’s research focus is to understand and manipulate the events that happen during early pregnancy in beef cattle. Her applied research focuses on the development of estrous synchronization protocols and novel alternatives such as Doppler ultrasonography for early pregnancy diagnosis or artificial intelligence for estrus detection. Her basic research focuses on studying the maternal-embryo crosstalk by transcriptomics, metabolomics and proteomics analysis in uterine and extrauterine tissues. Her current research priorities are puberty attainment in heifers, artificial insemination using gene-edited semen and the biochemical composition of the uterus in the second week of gestation. Rocha has authored or co-authored 33 peer-reviewed journal articles, 33 abstracts, two book chapters and 16 extension articles.