Dr. Padraig Lucey
The MPVM program congratulates Dr. Padraig Lucey on completing his MPVM and his dairy production medicine residency program and his plans to begin a PhD with the animal biology graduate group at UC Davis. In addition to being accepted to this prestigious program, he was awarded an international student fellowship to support his studies. He plans to work with Dr. Heidi Rossow on a project to create dairy cow diet models and develop a new diet formulation algorithm that will be based on population and group based parameters and performance targets.
Prior to the MPVM, Padraig was raised near the south coast of Ireland in Cork, surrounded by small dairy farms. He spent all his free time working for his uncles or neighbors milking cows. He obtained his Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine from University College Dublin Veterinary Medicine program and then he worked as a livestock veterinary associate for Parklands Veterinary Group, Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, in Northern Ireland. The availability of the MPVM program was a large part of Padraig’s initial decision to apply for the Dairy residency at UC Davis (in Tulare). Once here, the MPVM classes developed his interest in research, something he had never been able to explore in veterinary school. He says he is now research obsessed and enjoys working with Dr. Sharif Aly running statistics for some of his research on antimicrobial stewardship. His goal with the PhD program is to gain further biostats expertise and go on to work in the dairy industry to improve health outcomes through research.
Outside of research though, we expect he’ll continue his love of cows, hopefully have a chance to use all three of his languages (Irish, English, and French) and practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, of which he is a huge advocate and practitioner.