A&M student Xiaoqiu Wang won first place at the Alltech Young Scientist program’s global competition. The competition is the largest in existence for the agricultural sciences.
Wang, a physiology of reproduction graduate student, researches the mysterious role of fructose in livestock reproduction, which Wang said he hopes will decrease the embryonic mortality rate and increase reproductive performance.
“My study is to unleash the role of this fructose, which is to promote the embryo’s development,” Wang said. “We found the mechanism of fructose, so the long term goal is to improve the reproductive performance of livestock and create profits for animal enterprises.”
Wang said winning the competition had more benefits than the $10,000 scholarship, including global recognition and an increase in motivation.
“It’s also helped me see both sides: the academic and the industrial,” Wang said. “I met people from both, and now I know what issues in the industry they want to solve. So that helps me better understand what I should do in academia.”
Alltech, the company responsible for the competition, is a multinational agricultural company founded in Nicholasville, Kentucky in 1980. They host the annual Young Scientist competition as a means to give students the opportunity to be rewarded for their scientific discoveries and to compete internationally at the highest level. It also helps students see beyond academia and how their research impacts industry.
Over 9,000 participants from over 60 countries submitted their research this year, and only 8 finalists made it to the global competition.
But this wasn’t Wang’s first competition, as he regularly takes part in Society for the Study of Reproduction (SSR) meetings and competitions.
“Because I’m in animal science and my major is physiology of reproduction, I’m a part of a society we have called SSR,” Wang said. “We have an annual meeting with competitions each year, and I always create oral presentation or posters to present my research. So this is my fourth year for presenting data.”
The judges, composed of both world-renowned professors and project leads for Alltech, reviewed the participants based on the quality of their research papers and their oral presentations.