Boris Lukic

Boris Lukić was born in 1983 in Osijek, Croatia. After completion of primary and grammar school, he was enrolled at the Faculty of Agriculture in Osijek in 2002 at the graduate studies of Animal husbandry. During his studies he was awarded the scholarship of the Ministry of Science for being among the 10% of the most successful students at the Faculty. He graduated in 2009 with the thesis: "Investigation of meat quality of hybrid pigs" and became a graduate engineer of agriculture, programme zootechnics. While studying he spent several months doing the research internships in Germany at the National Agricultural Research Center "FAL Braunschweig" and in Poland at AgroTak Group cattle farm. Boris has participated on the Festival of Science with lectures and workshops, as well as at the Summer school, organized by the Mediterranean Institute for Life Sciences "MedILS" Split, Croatia, on a number of occasions. In 2006 he won the Rector's Award as the most successful student. As a final year student, he was working at a pig fattening farm in Eastern Croatia. In 2009 he started his academic career as a research assistant at the Faculty of Agriculture, department of Special Zootechnics and the same year he was enrolled in postgraduate study "Agricultural Sciences" with major in "Animal breeding". As a PhD student, he has attended advanced courses in statistics and genomics. Within the Erasmus and Croatian Science Foundation programmes he visited the Roslin Institute of Edinburgh University, where he later spent 1 year doing a PhD research on a project about the prediction of genomic breeding values and genomic selection against boar taint. He defended his PhD thesis in 2015. He participated as a research associate on the numerous projects of the Croatian Ministry of Science, Croatian Science Foundation and Horizon 2020 programme. He is currently the leader of one competitive EU project related with integrating genomic information with sensor data (video surveillance, thermo cameras, collars etc.) using AI models, and also the leader of two small scientific projects and a collaborator at other two. In 2022, he became Associate Professor and teaches students undergraduate and graduate courses: “Basics of genetics and selection”, “Quantitative genetics and selection”, “Breeding programs” and “Conservation of animal genetic resources”. He participated in various workshops and summer schools in the field of genetics, genomics and statistics. His research focuses on genetics and genomics in livestock species as well as application of various approaches on how to improve the quality of animal products.