Today we celebrate International Day of Women and Girls in Science, which is marking its 10th anniversary, and began with the purpose of raising awareness and educational activities to promote full and equal access for females in the science field.
At AFBI, we fully embrace this message and strive for gender equality in all that we do.
We are very proud to be a STEM organisation that has an almost even split of male to female scientists across the organisation. With a 45:55 female to male ratio of our almost 500 strong field, sea and lab-based scientists, we are keen to work towards equal representation of men and women over the coming years. This is driven by the work we are doing in collaboration with our managers, with the support of our People and Culture team, as well as our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion working group. Examples of this, that we will implement in the coming year include a Women’s Network along with a Mentoring Scheme, which will be available to our female employees in the pilot phase, and will help to develop our employees at all grades, building and strengthening skills that will contribute to their future progression within AFBI.
In celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science today, and in line with its theme for 2025 ‘Unpacking STEM Careers: Her Voice in Science’ we wish to showcase our teams’ achievements, acknowledging the wonderful and dynamic work of our female scientists here. And with that, we are sharing with you some of the specialised and prestigious projects that are underway across the organisation.
Beginning with Environmental Marine Sciences Division, and specifically Marine Fisheries, we have been significantly progressing the ecosystem approach to fisheries management (EBFM), with ‘mixed fisheries scenarios’ now being regularly issued for Irish Sea fish stocks alongside annual single stock advice. These scenarios provide projections of how changes in the landings of one species may impact the landings of other commercially exploited stocks in the same fishing region. This has been lead out by Ruth Kelly and the Marine Fisheries team, in Fisheries and Aquatic Ecosystems Branch.
Women are at the forefront of a number of major soil science projects in AFBI, including the delivery of the world-leading £37 million NI Soil Nutrient Health Scheme, with female scientific lead Dr Rachel Cassidy, and project manager Colleen Ward from our Agri-Environment Branch.
Soil science is going from strength-to-strength with Dr Suzanne Higgins achieving success in a number of prestigious international projects such as a US-Ireland funded collaboration, assessing the role of biochar in soil. Suzanne is the UK lead within EJP Soil, a Horizon Europe funded project with 26 partners across Europe. Through this, Suzanne and colleagues have established a UK National Hub for soil monitoring and soil health.
For our Veterinary Science Division, we will share some of what is happening in the AMR lab of the Bacteriology Branch. The 2024-2029 AMR National Plan issued in 2024 aims to tackle antimicrobial resistance in humans, animals and the environment as well as maximising the surveillance of the resistance.
AFBI’s AMR lab is the main antimicrobial resistance lab in Northern Ireland. The lab, in partnership with AFBI’s genomic lab to offer more comprehensive analyses, has made great advances within this field, in the wake of the Windsor Framework. This is being done through the monitoring and reporting of AMR zoonotic and commensal bacteria in healthy animals at slaughter and in 3rd Country fresh meat samples at Border Inspection Posts and fresh meat at retail. The AMR lab is managed by Catherine Couzens and her team including; Tara Rowley and Lisa Adams. The Pathogen Genomics in AFBI is led by Dr Purnika Ranasinghe. AMR surveillance and relevant dissemination in the Food Micro lab is lead out by Pam Scates and her team in Newforge. Together they seek to push the AMR research across the One Health Agenda promoting industry led initiatives and pushing the surveillance into further fields in order to combat the global AMR threat.
Also in VSD, Chemical Surveillance Branch (CSB), led by Dr Anna Gadaj, provides chemical residue testing which supports NI trade both nationally and internationally. This job is essential in order to meet regulatory standards, protect human and animal health, and enable NI to export globally. State-of-the art technologies are employed to achieve these goals i.e. mass spectrometry platforms with ability to detect sub ppb levels. This sensitivity can be utilized in areas where low level contamination may be of concern, i.e. banned residues or AMR. The ongoing R&D activities undertaken in CSB have been presented at major international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals.
Moving to our Sustainable Agri Food Science Division, Dr Gillian Young leads AFBI’s grass breeding and research programme at AFBI Loughgall. Dr Suzanne Johnson is also key to the success of the programme as the fields trials manager. The grass breeding programme in AFBI is highly successful with almost 1/3 of grass varieties available to farmers across the UK and Ireland being from the AFBI programme. Grass breeding is a very long-term activity, with varieties that are being generated this year taking 12-15 years to come to market. As such, Gillian must look far into the future when selecting key traits for these future varieties, with the current focus on traits that create resilience to climate change and support grassland farmers adapt to a world where we expect our weather to be more volatile and intense. In her work on this, Gillian is now evolving the programme to include an underpinning research programme with a focus on genomic selection and root morphology.
In the field of pig and poultry production and nutrition, Dr Elizabeth Ball is an expert. Within the Sustainable Livestock Systems Branch, leading the Monogastric Systems Team, Elizabeth and her team’s research has resulted in changes to policy and governmental strategies and underpinned major industry decisions which have significantly reduced the environmental impact of pig and poultry systems, through changes in nutritional and management techniques. Elizabeth works closely with both DAERA and industry across the UK and beyond to ensure the impact of her research is realised on farms. The outcomes of this work are being adopted by the UK national inventory and industry and is supporting the industry further improve their sustainability.
The above represents a handful of excellent women that are actively working in science in AFBI and are making a significant impact – we know there are many more. As we can see from all of the insights shared here, there is a great deal of inspiring work underway across our different sites and divisions, where we are making incredible advances in the world of marine, agricultural and veterinary science. All of this progress and impact has been made possible by the talented work of AFBI’s women scientists, the women who work in the labs, who process the samples and analyse the results and who work alongside their male colleagues to produce outstanding work at national and international levels.
On International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we would like to thank all our scientists, and especially our women scientists, for your hard work and continued contribution to help deliver on our ambitious goals and look forward to taking our plans further through the implementation of our Science Strategy, which will positively impact us all, pushing us to new levels of scientific excellence.
