Dairy spotlight: Robert Tempelman
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EmailTempelman is a quantitative geneticist with key research interests in statistical genetic modeling applied to various problems in dairy cattle breeding.
Robert (Rob) J. Tempelman, PhD, has been a faculty member within the MSU Department of Animal Science since 1995. Prior to that, he was on the faculty in the Department of Experimental Statistics at Louisiana State University after graduating with his PhD in Dairy Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Tempelman is a quantitative geneticist with key research interests in statistical genetic modeling applied to various problems in dairy cattle breeding. Applications have included improving accuracy of genetic merit prediction for health and fertility traits, genomic prediction, the identification of genomic regions important for economically important traits and joint modeling of the traits that are important components of feed efficiency in dairy cattle. His more recent work involves the use of milk spectral data to predict milk fatty acid profiles and feed intakes as well as inferring genotype by environment interaction for novel traits in dairy cattle. Tempelman has been a coauthor on nearly 150 peer-reviewed papers.
He won the prestigious J L Lush Award in Animal Breeding from the American Dairy Science Association in 2017 and recently won the CANR Excellence in Research Impact Award along with Mike Vandehaar for their work on the genomics of dairy cattle feed efficiency. Tempelman also teaches graduate students how to use statistical methods and experimental design for their own research programs. Furthermore, he is the Director of the CANR Statistical Consulting Center which services the statistical needs of research projects throughout the college.
