News Archive

New appointment in School of Agriculture and CEDAR – University of Reading

The University of Reading has appointed Professor Ian Givens to the Chair of Animal Science in the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, and to the post of Director of the Centre for Dairy Research (CEDAR), from April 1 2004. This follows the retirement of Professor David Beever from the university on March 31. Professor Givens will continue to be Director of the Nutritional Sciences Research Unit (NSRU) in the School and it is the intention to operate CEDAR and NSRU as a new integrated animal science research group. Professor Ian Givens is an animal biochemist/nutritionist with some 30 years' experience with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) and ADAS. He was heavily involved in the Feed into Milk project which has created new approaches to assessing nutrient supply from feeds and diet formulation for high yielding cows. He has a particular interest in the relationship between animal nutrition and human nutrition and health and is currently working on the EU LIPGENE project examining the role of fatty acids in animal derived foods in the human metabolic syndrome. Looking forward to his new post, Professor Givens believes that agri-food chain research must move further in the direction of improving human health. He said: "The future will see the role of animals in agriculture fundamentally change from just producers of milk, meat and eggs to producers of food products that are not only conductive to or can functionally promote long-term health." End For further information, please contact Craig Hillsley, the university's press officer, on 0118 378 7388 or email c.hillsley@reading.ac.uk Notes for editors 1. Research in animal science and production at the University of Reading includes beef, chickens, sheep and veterinary epidemiology as well as the dairy cow research for which it is probably best known. The University's farms and farm-based research sites occupy some 850 hectares at Arborfield, Shinfield and Sonning. They represent a significant commercial farming operation as well as locations for much of the research in the university's Department of Agriculture. 2. The University of Reading's Centre for Dairy Research (CEDAR) was established in its present form in 1992 when the University took over the Bernard Weitz Centre from the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research. The Centre is at Arborfield Hall Farm at Shinfield, 5km from campus. CEDAR occupies 470 hectares, and has a 400+ cow dairy unit (The Applied Unit) equipped to record individual feed intakes, as well as milk yield and milk composition for all cows. A further building with standings for 36 cows and two calorimeters for measuring energy balance (The Metabolism Unit) provides for more elaborate research in conjunction with the laboratories on the main university campus. Thus equipped, CEDAR represents the largest facility in the UK for nutritional, reproductive and metabolic studies with dairy cows.