Bridging Research Disciplines to Advance Animal Welfare Science

Irene Camerlink (Edited By) Dr Irene Camerlink is an ethologist researching animal behaviour and welfare, with a focus on the social behaviour of pigs. She conducted her PhD at Wageningen University (Netherlands) and thereafter worked as postdoctoral researcher at SRUC (Edinburgh, UK) and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna (Austria) before taking a position as Assistant Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland. Throughout her career she has studied pig welfare by combining multiple disciplines such as genetics, ethology, behavioural ecology and social sciences. She has over 40 peer-reviewed scientific publications, which have been cited >558 times (Google Scholar), resulting in an h-index of 14. She is Senior Editor for the International Society of Animal Ethology (ISAE) and Editorial Board Member for the Nature journal Scientific Reports. She was editor for the book 'Animal welfare in Practice: Pigs'. In 2017 she won the New Investigator Award of the International Society of Applied Ethology (ISAE). Her research interests are, amongst others, animal behaviour and welfare, social interactions, pig husbandry, early life development, cognition, and the translation of research into practice.

Section 1: Crossing disciplines 1: Interdisciplinary Research to Advance Animal Welfare Science: An Introduction 2: Pragmatics for Cross-disciplinary Collaboration 3: Doing Animal Welfare Transdisciplinary Research with Stakeholders: Advantages, Pitfalls and Hands-on Solutions 4: Interdisciplinarity and the Dilemmas of Knowledge Section 2: Applying other disciplines in animal welfare research 5: Human-centred Research Approaches to Improve Animal Welfare: Survey Design and Stakeholder Involvement 6: Human Behaviour Change Models for Improving Animal Welfare 7: Applying Economic Models to Assess the Viability of Animal Welfare Interventions 8: Application of Psychometrics to Assess Quality of Life in Animals 9: Behavioural Tests for Learning and Cognition in Humans and Animals 10: Using Neuroscience to Better Understand Animals and their Welfare 11: The Microbiota–Gut–Brain Axis in Determining Social Behaviours of Animals 12: Improving Animal Welfare Using Genetic and Genomic Tools 13: Epigenetic Tools to Identify Stress and Exposure to Detrimental Conditions in Production Animals 14: Using Principles from Behavioural Ecology to Address Animal Welfare Issues 15: Practical Considerations for the Use of Precision Livestock Farming to Improve Animal Welfare