Professor Julius Van der Werf
Professor in Animal Genetics - Faculty of Science, Agriculture, Business and Law; School of Environmental and Rural Science
Biography
Julius van der Werf holds an MSc and PhD from Wageningen University, The Netherlands and studied at Cornell University in New York. He started as Assistant Professor in Wageningen from 1985 to 1993, Senior Researcher in dairy cattle breeding at the National Institute for Animal Science and Health between 1993 and 1997. In 1997, he moved to Armidale, first as Senior Lecturer and now as Professor in Animal Breeding and Genetics at the University of New England. Julius specialises in research into genetic evaluation, breeding program design, breeding objectives and genomic selection. He has supervised more than 60 PhD students. He was manager of the Sheep CRC genetics program from 2003-2019, during which genomic selection was implemented in the Australian Sheep Industry. Julius has been a member of several industry advisor committees and was on the panel of experts of the Australian Research Council (2019-2021). He was also Editor of leading journals such as Genetics, Selection and Evolution journal and the Journal of Animal Breeding and Genetics. He is now Head of School of Environmental and Rural Science.
