Award:
ASAS Young Scholar Award
Univeristy:
University of Missouri
Year:
2025
Section Awarded:
National
Cecilia Constantino Rocha, ASAS Young Scholar Award
Sponsored by: Elanco
Cecilia Constantino Rocha is an Assistant Research Professor in livestock systems in the Division of Animal Sciences at the University of Missouri. The focus of her career 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. Dr. Rocha has authored or co-authored 33 peer-reviewed journal articles, 33 abstracts, 2 book chapters, and 16 extension articles.