EAStalk webinar IGNITION project

💡 Brief Summary of the Presentation: Ignition aims to make a significant improvement to aquaculture animal health and welfare. The project first uses cutting edge tools to characterise responses to stressful events and diseases that can occur in aquaculture setting, then aims to develop methods to mitigate these events by improving nutrition, vaccination and genetics. In this seminar we explore the overall aims and methods used in the project and take a deeper dive into some of the novel tools that will be used to manage and exploit the huge amounts of data produced within. Finally we outline how these novel endpoints will be used to study the genetics underlying these responses.
🗣️ About the Presenters:
👨🏻‍💼 Benjamín Costas completed a Masters in Aquaculture by the University of Algarve in 2006, and in 2011 achieved a PhD degree in Animal Science by the University of Porto. Benjamín is currently Principal Researcher at CIIMAR and Head of Aquatic Animal Health, a young and strongly motivated team highlighting nutritional immunology as main research line. Dr. Costas is passionate about aquatic animal health and welfare and is actually the coordinator of IGNITION project. Main research is targeting novel strategies to improve health, welfare and disease resistance in aquatic animals as well as to develop non-invasive biomarkers of animal health.
👩🏻‍💼 Ana Gonçalves is a marine biologist affiliated with Algarve University, holding a Master's degree in Science and a Ph.D. in Applied Marine Biosciences from Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology in Japan. She currently serves as a senior researcher at SPAROS, a Portugal-based science-driven aquafeed-producing company. In the IGNITION project, they are leading WP5, where their focus is on consolidating information related to animal responses from various work packages. Employing data mining and machine learning strategies, their aim is to identify biomarkers that offer enhanced predictability of fish performance output. These biomarkers will be integrated into non-invasive sensors for early detection purposes.
👨🏻‍💼 Tim Bean is a senior research scientist at The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh. Tim’s group studies many aspects of aquaculture but with a primary focus on biology, disease and genetics of shellfish. Roslin are leaders of Work Package 6 in IGNITION, which aims to study the genetics underlying many of the responses to pathogenic challenge that are being observed across the other work packages.
Learn more about the IGNITION project: ignition-proje...
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
EAS talk is a series of webinars that are coordinated and moderated by the EAS secretariat. The series aims to present a wide range of subjects reflecting the multi-disciplinary nature of EAS and the aquaculture community. This includes overviews of aquaculture research areas, production, and technologies (including from EAS Corporate members), but also mixed with presentations on our network and its benefits and specific topics for our large student community.
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
FOLLOW US:
➖ Twitter: / easaqua​​
➖ LinkedIn: / european-aquaculture-society
'AQUACULTURE EUROPE 2025 “Aquaculture for/with Everyone” Valencia, Spain - September 22-25, 2025.
Please visit the website www.aquaeas.org for more information on our events.