The Meat Science & Animal Biologics Discovery (MSABD) graduate program provides exceptional opportunities for students to gain fundamental knowledge and well-rounded skills associated with the meat industry (e.g. quality, safety, marketing) and to delve into discovering novel animal biologics for animal and human health. Students will be able to develop a set of comprehensive abilities that will be highly sought after by future employers in the industry, academia, and government. The graduate program is built around providing students with an individually tailored and all-compassing world-class experience to help launch their career path of interest while providing research, teaching, and outreach experiences that promote discovery, understanding, and dissemination of new knowledge to advance the science, benefiting the field, industry, and public. The MSABD program provides opportunities for students to integrate a breadth of hands-on experiences in the most advanced, comprehensive facility in the U.S. The MSABD facility has capabilities for harvesting a diversity of livestock (red meats and poultry), carcass fabrication, and further processing. In addition, the facility offers unprecedented opportunities to work with BSL-2 exposed animals and meat processing food safety in world-class, comprehensive meat and animal biological safety laboratory.
The MSABD program provides students who are interested in the biological sciences opportunities to integrate knowledge associated with a variety of scientific fields including biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, muscle biology and chemistry, physiology, immunology, and microbiology. Students with these types of interests can become involved with efforts ranging from producing new and safer foods to discovering biologically active compounds from the processing industry that have animal nutraceutical and human health uses. Students interested in animal biologics can receive training in fundamental biological sciences with a variety of skills such as gene editing and cloning, gene expression in prokaryote and eukaryote cells, protein purification from cells and tissues, cell cultures and large dataset analysis from the second or third generation RNA/DNA sequencing as well as mass spectrometry. Graduate students are also provided with opportunities to develop skills associated with technical writing (grants, manuscripts), professional presentations, classroom instruction, and extension activities.
M.S. level graduates find employment in the meat industry in advanced positions/roles (e.g. quality control, food safety, product development, production supervision) in production and allied industries (seasoning, packaging, equipment). Ph.D. level graduates normally build their careers in academia (research, teaching, extension), higher supervision, research & development, and management roles in meat production or allied industries, or medical/pharmaceutical positions.