30 Jun 2020
Irene Camerlink has been awarded the UFAW Young Animal Welfare Scientist of the Year Award for exceptional work improving pig welfare.
Paul Imrie
Job Title
Irene Camerlink.
A young scientist who impressed in her time at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) has been awarded a prestigious award for her research in pig welfare.
Irene Camerlink is described as “driven by the wish to make a change to animal welfare” and has landed the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) Young Animal Welfare Scientist of the Year Award 2020.
After finishing an animal science degree in 2007, Dr Camerlink (pictured) studied an MSc on research animal sciences at Wageningen University in the Netherlands before undertaking a PhD studying pig behaviour that began her career studying pig behaviour and welfare.
After her PhD she moved to SRUC, where she began as a postdoctoral researcher on a project on pig aggression with Simon Turner. In this time, she made extensive contributions to the study of social behaviour in the species and is now internationally respected in the field.
Dr Camerlink – who later moved the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna before basing herself at the Institute of Genetics and Animal Biotechnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences – has written more than 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals and is considered an outstanding mentor.
Dr Turner, senior researcher in SRUC’s animal behaviour and welfare team, wrote one of a number of letters of recommendation for Dr Camerlink to win the award.
In it, Dr Turner said: “Irene has been instrumental in supervising work on farmer attitudes, perceptions and willingness-to-pay for welfare benefits.
“Irene has been a champion of efforts to understand constraints to farmer behaviour and how we can overcome these to encourage implementation of management techniques that will improve welfare.
She recently proactively identified the lack of a farmer-focused accessible book describing the current state-of-the-art recommendations on improving common pig welfare-related problems. As a result, she is now the editor of a book that I believe will be a go-to resource for farmers.”
Fay Clark, lecturer in animal behaviour and welfare at Bristol Zoological Society, was highly commended in this year’s awards for her work in zoo animal welfare.
Both were acknowledged in a virtual ceremony as part of a UFAW conference earlier today (30 June).
