Dr. Brenda Murdoch received her B.Sc. and Ph.D., with exemplary performance, from the University of Alberta. She was then employed as an assistant research professor in the School of Molecular Biosciences at Washington State University for several years prior to joining the University of Idaho in 2014. Dr. Murdoch is currently a professor in the Department of Animal, Veterinary and Food Sciences, affiliate faculty member in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and a member of the Institute of Modeling Collaboration and Innovation at the University of Idaho. Dr. Murdoch’s research aims to characterize how genetic and epigenetic variations influence key biological traits, enhancing our understanding of the role genomic variation plays in both undesirable outcomes, such as disease, and desirable traits of economic importance. Key ongoing research projects that Dr. Murdoch is involved in include the functional annotation of the animal genomes of both cattle and sheep and assemblies of both the ovine and bovine pangenomes. Additionally, she has developed genomic resource tools to enhance the sheep and goat industry.