Maren Wellenreuther

e-mail: Mike Ruigrok@plantandfood.co.nz
Supervisors: Maren Wellenreuther, Linley Jesson (Plant and Food Research), Mengjie Zhang (Victoria University of Wellington), Bing Xue (Victoria University of Wellington) and Yi Mei (Victoria University of Wellington)
Funding: MBIE Data Science for Aquaculture

Multi-criteria modelling to advance aquaculture breeding programmes

Mike Ruigrok is a PhD student at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand under supervision of Maren Wellenreuther, Linley Jesson, Mengjie Zhang, Bing Xue and Yi Mei. His bachelor’s thesis was completed at Plant and Food Research by doing an internship, which focussed on the genetic sex determination mechanisms underlying the monomorphic New Zealand Trevally fish. Mike’s current research is to use machine learning models to predict traits in Snapper.

My main interest lies in using informatics to study and gain insight in (marine) biology and for my PhD project my task is to use quantitative traits like growth/sex and link these traits to data like mutation data (SNPs/SVs) in the Australasian snapper (Chrysophrys auratus). The goal here is to predict the outcome of growth for a specific time period (1 year to 3 years) or the sex that the fish has with different prediction models and if successful to transfer this to other species like The New Zealand Trevally (Pseudocaranx auratus).