Alice Rocha is a recent PhD graduate from Dr. Frank Mitloehner's Animal Biology Graduate Group at the University of California, at Davis. Alice’s research interests are centered on global and sustainable production of dairy and beef cattle systems, including ruminant nutrition, ruminant microbiology, economics surrounding cattle management, and the social implications of livestock production.

Alice is interested in how the rumen environment can be altered to reduce methane emissions and how changes on at the animal level have systemic impacts. Her masters work focused on analyzing the current manure management systems of smallholder dairy farms in Indonesia and how these systems have environmental and economic impacts on producers and consumers alike. Additionally, she worked on determining the impacts of lactic acid bacteria inoculants in silage on milk production and nutrient efficiency.

During her PhD, Alice calculated the environmental impact of Holstein versus Jersey populations, quantifying water consumption, land use, and the carbon footprint associated with milk production across both popular dairy cattle breeds. She also evaluated the efficacy of a new manure additive, testing it in both fresh dairy slurry and dairy lagoon wastewater in order to quantify its overall impacts to manure quality, greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant emissions. She followed up this work with a metagenomic characterization of the microbiome in dairy slurry and dairy lagoon wastewater and determined how the manure additive changed the microbial population. 

Education

• Ph.D. in Animal Biology, University of California, Davis
• M.S. in Global and Sustainable Animal Production Systems, Wageningen University and Research (2020)
• B.S. in Animal Science, University of California, Davis (2018)

Research Interests

• Mitigating environmental impacts of ruminant production
• Systems modeling of livestock production systems
• Using feed additives and alternative management strategies to improve cattle production