Columbus, Ohio – The Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding (CDCB) has hired João Walter Dürr of Uppsala, Sweden, as its chief executive officer. Dürr, who will be relocating to the Beltsville, Md. area, brings a wealth of managerial experience in milk recording, database development and genetic evaluation to CDCB. Since 2008, he has served as the Interbull Centre executive director.
In 1991, Dürr earned a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; followed by master’s and doctorate degrees from McGill University, Montreal, in animal science, breeding and genetics. From 1997 to 2008, he held various positions with Universidade de Passo Fundo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, including Veterinary School professor, Dairy Herds Analysis Service general manager, Food Science Research Centre director and associate vice principal for research. In addition, he served as president of the Brazilian Milk Quality Council, a national, non-profit organization with a mission of promoting milk quality and mastitis prevention in Brazil, from 2004 to 2007.
As the Interbull executive director, Dürr helped coordinate the organization’s transition from academics to a business-oriented operation, incorporating new services into the portfolio. He also skillfully guided Interbull through the genomic revolution and provided a network for scientific and dairy industry communities to develop the framework of applied cattle genomics. Additionally, Dürr created a dynamic web site to improve communication with service users and the general public, implemented a quality assurance infrastructure to comply with international standards, and helped streamline genetic evaluation operations to handle multi-country pedigrees and estimated breeding values.
“With CDCB in its early stages of coordinating service responsibilities for calculating and distributing genetic evaluations and genomic predictions, providing dairy cattle management and benchmarking tools, managing data storage and analyzing and distributing dairy cattle data, João’s immense experience with business management transitioning, genetic evaluations, performance recording, data processing and database management will help the U.S. dairy cattle industry build on its world leadership position and remain the gold standard in global genetic progress,” said CDCB Chair Ole Meland. “João understands how the United States – the most influential dairy cattle breeding country in the world – functions and possesses the managerial skills needed to coordinate a multi-dimensional operation and the entrepreneurship required to build a solid infrastructure of services. We look forward to João leading and managing CDCB’s business and financial operations, and building and improving the data and practices among CDCB’s partners.”
CDCB conducts genetic evaluations for economically important traits of dairy cattle. The CDCB allied partners cooperator database is the largest in the world, which is devoted to dairy animals, with more than 120 million female phenotypic records and more than 480,000 males receiving genetic evaluations or genomic predictions.