Dr Toni Reverter-Gomez
/Antonio Reverter/
Senior Principal Research Scientist
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Contact details:
ST. LUCIA QLD 4067 AUSTRALIA
Biography
Shortly after graduating from a B.Sc. degree in Veterinary Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, Toni was awarded a USDA PhD scholarship and in 1990 moved to Colorado State University to pursue a double degree of MS in Statistics and a PhD in Animal Sciences. In 1995, Toni joined the Animal Genetics and Breeding Unit (AGBU) at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW. At the AGBU, Toni worked on all aspects, including computer programming and quantitative analyses related to BREEDPLAN, the Australian national genetic evaluation system for beef cattle. Since 2002, Toni has been based in Brisbane with CSIRO where he provides skills in computational and systems biology, quantitative and molecular genetics. In 2005, Toni was the recipient of the inaugural $10,000 Eureka Prize for Bioinformatics Research.
With over 300 refereed publications, Toni has been cited more than 11,000 times, an h-index of 61 and averaged 11 papers per year over the past 5 years in peer-reviewed journals, as well as invited and contributed papers to international meetings, book chapters, patents and reports. Regularly invited to deliver keynote speeches in international conferences and symposiums, Toni was the proud president of the 2017 conference of the Association for the Advancement of Animal Breeding and Genetics (www.aaabg2017.org) which is the Australasian regions premier forum for discussing and disseminating research in this area. Toni has been Associate Editor of the Journal of Animal Science (2009-2014) and BMC Genomics (2010-2013). Currently, he is Associate Editor of Genetics Selection Evolution.
In 2010-11, Toni was awarded the prestigious $35,000 Helen Newton Turner CSIRO Award. In 2013, Toni was promoted to CSOF8.2 and appointed Research Group Leader of Systems, Bioinformatics and Statistics. Resulting from the 2014 Integrated Reform Program, Toni was appointed Research Team Leader of the Computational and Systems Biology. In 2017, Toni was promoted to CSOF8.3 and since then has gained line management delegation and authority including commercial and legal, finance, procurement and property, and HR.
Toni Reverter takes great pride in mentoring junior scientists, PhD Students and Post-Doctoral Fellows (PDF), encouraging them to develop their skills while being part of a bigger team. Recent PDF supervised by Toni include: Dr. Eva Chan (2008-2010; then moving to Monsanto, CA, USA, and currently at Garvan Institute, Sydney); Dr. Shivashankar Nagaraj (2009- 2011; now at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, UQ, Brisbane); currently Dr. Laercio Porto-Neto (OCE Post-Doc with a project entitled “Understanding and improving fertility in tropical beef cattle”). At the same time, Toni has been instrumental in the development of research proposals in livestock genomics that are currently active including: Transformational Genomics and Beef Breeding Strategies (funded by the Queensland Government); DNA pooling to enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of chicken breeding (funded by Cobb-Vantres Inc., AR, USA); Developing new methods to determine genomic relationships (funded by Meat & Livestock Australia).
Almost all biological traits of importance are complex, variation in such traits being controlled by many genes of small effect plus environmental influences. Probing the causes of complex trait variation is critical to our understanding in disciplines as diverse as evolutionary biology, animal and plant breeding, behaviour, genetics of disease and personalised medicine. The advent of high throughput phenotyping, genotyping and sequencing has transformed our ability to dissect these traits and harness findings across all these disciplines, and it is the aim of this meeting to bring all these fields together.
Toni’s primary research vision is built on capitalising on the post-genomics ‘Big Data’ revolution that is in the process of sweeping the agricultural sciences and looks set to continue. It is vital that both molecular and quantitative scientists continue to develop innovative analytical methods and capabilities in this area. It is already clear that generating genomic, transcriptomic, epigenetic and metabolomics data is becoming more routine and, according to Toni’s believes, fundamental to revolutionising how we may predict and manage animal performance in both health and disease as we collectively look to the future.
Other Interests
Choir Singing: Tenor 2 with the Brisbane Chorale (http://www.brisbanechorale.org.au/)
Mountain Biking
Current Roles
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Angus Australia: Angus 2023
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ABBA: Immune Competence Testing 2024
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UNE Future Drought Fund: evaluating strategic selling strategies for drought resilience
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Mission Drought
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Northern Australia – Prawns
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R+CERC PDF22-1-1342: Feral Cattle; Natural selection eats domestication for breakfast
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MLA L.GEN.2217: Immune Competence Testing Multibreed
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Animal_Systems 1 MOSH_CAF-2
Academic Qualifications
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1994
PhD Animal Science (Quantitative Genetics) - Colorado State University, USA.
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1994
MSc Statistics (Linear Models) - Colorado State University, USA.
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1989
BSc Veterinary Science (Animal Production) - Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain.
Achievements and Awards
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2005
Eureka Prize for Bioinformatics Research
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2010-2011
CSIRO Helen Newton Turner Award
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2023-
2023 CSIRO Entrepreneurship Award
Grants
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2013-2014
Developing new methods to determine genomic relationships for improved breeding (MLA: B.BSC.0344)
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2014-2016
Optimising genomic predictions of broiler chicken feed efficiency (Cobb- Vantress Inc.)
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2013-2014
Poultry feed efficiency genomics (Cobb-Vantress Inc.)
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2015-2017
Low density SNP panels for poultry breeding (Cobb-Vantress Inc.)
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2017-2019
Postdoctoral Fellowship in Quantitative Genetics & Genomics - Tropical Livestock (CSIRO Science Excellence Research Office)
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2016-2019
Postdoctoral Fellowship in Genomic analytics in the realm of Big Data (CSIRO Science Excellence Research Office)
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2017-2018
A Multi-Species Genomic Prediction Platform (CSIRO Genome to Phenome Science Platform)
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2015-2017
Breeding Optimal Queensland beef cattle (Qld government Accelerate Partnerships program)
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2015-2017
Zoetis CattleCall (Zoetis)
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2011-2012
Genome-wide association study of tropical composite bulls for reproduction traits (MLA: B.NBP.0723)
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2011-2014
Genomics for Beef Herd Productivity (Qld government SmartFutures partnerships program)
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2017-2019
More Beef, Less Feed (Qld government Advance Queensland partnership program and NAPCO)
Community and Corporate Citizenship
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October 2019-Present
Member of Advisory Committee of Joint International Research Laboratory of Agriculture and Agri-Product Safety of the Ministry of Education of China, Yangzhou University
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January 2020-2023
Member of the External Expert Advisory Board (EEAB) in the Project “Identification of functionally active genomic features relevant to phenotypic diversity and plasticity in cattle, in short BovReg 815668 (the “Project”) funded by the European Union under the call H2020-SFS-2018-2020/H2020-SFS-2018-2: Agri-Aqua-Labs; Understanding the genome of farmed animals, its expression and translation into traits.
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April 2020-Present
Member of the BREEDPLAN and Sheep Genetics Technical Committee. The role of the Committee is to act in an advisory capacity to University of New England (UNE), NSW Department of Primary Industries (NSWDPI) and Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) together known as the ‘Owners’ of the BREEDPLAN and OVIS Analytical Software responsible for the Australian genetic evaluation systems applied to cattle, goats and sheep under BREEDPLAN and Sheep Genetics.
Publications
We have publications by Dr Toni Reverter-Gomez