New people in the PPILOW project: Evelien Graat, Helen Pluschke

Evelien Graat (ILVO, PhD student)

Evelien Graat is a PhD student in the animal welfare research group at ILVO who works on the PPILOW project full time. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in behavioural ecology from Utrecht University. Her PhD project focusses on welfare self-assessments of pigs and poultry by farmers (WP3) and on resilience in broiler chickens (WP6) and is supervised by prof. Frank Tuyttens (ILVO) and prof. Bas Rodenburg (Utrecht University).

Helen Pluschke (Thuenen Institute)

Helen Pluschke holds a B.Sc. in Agricultural Sciences (UBC Vancouver, HU Berlin) and a M.Sc. in Crop Science (MLU Halle). She is part of the researcher team at the Thuenen Institute of Organic Farming, where part of Task 5.1 of the PPILOW project will be conducted. She is committed to the development of robust dual-purpose breeds for organic production systems and tackling the challenges that this currently entails. She is curious about exploring actual nutritional requirements, suitability for currently used systems (mobile coops, foraging behaviour), overall robustness and vitality and in the end the taste and quality of products of the dual-purpose genotypes used in the PPILOW project.