Hubbard has announced the appointment of Thomas de Bretagne to the position of Director Research & Development. He will report directly to Olivier Rochard, CEO of Hubbard.
Thomas joins the Hubbard team with a background in agricultural engineering and a career history focussed on animal selection from early on. In 2002, he joined the R&D team at Pen Ar Lan working on pig genetics, taking the lead in 2005. In 2010, when many new technologies were emerging in the field of cattle genetics (e.g. genomic selection and high-throughput phenotyping methods), he took charge of Groupe Evolution’s selection programmes until he joined Hubbard at the end of 2016.
Thomas will follow the guiding principle of R&D teams: making every possible effort to fulfil the expectations of both clients and markets. He will be travelling overseas extensively to meet with all Hubbard’s stakeholders and partners.
His main objectives are twofold. Firstly, to steer Hubbard through a new phase in selection marked by intensive use of emerging new technologies relevant to animal genetic selection – tools which are now becoming increasingly routine in genetics and enable Hubbard to select with greater precision – such as RFID, accelerometer sensors, imaging technologies and genomics.