Hi, my name is Guglielmo, but most call me Orso. Guglielmo is a common name in Italy, my home country, however it’s not particularly easy to pronounce for native English speakers, as such my childhood nickname has shadowed me through life.
I am a fish biologist, focusing on host-associated gut microbial systems, particularly in rainbow trout O. mykiss. I think fish are fascinating, and extremely tasty. My interest in fish began early in life, and blossomed into a professional and scientific career when I began studying aquaculture. I spent formative years working in an experimental tropical marine fish hatchery at the University of Miami, where I was involved in research projects centered on not yet commonly farmed marine fish species, including the Japanese Olive flounder P. olivaceus, mahi-mahi C. hippurus, American red snapper L. campechanus and several others. Serendipitously, I went on to spend several years working with Nile tilapia O. niloticus at a cutting edge genetics company, where I was introduced to the wonders of animal domestication and genetic improvement first-hand.
Implementing industrial directed evolution at a scale fulfilling Charles Darwin’s wildest fantasies, we phenotyped 30,000 animals annually at Spring Genetics, choosing the best performing, and highest merit animals for propagation. In tandem with raw growth performance, resistance to several common bacterially mediated diseases like S agalactiae & S Iniaie was deemed the highest priority for the breeding program, and Tilapia seedstock produced at Spring Genetics was likely the highest quality worldwide.
Fish are not cars, and marginal engineered improvements do not originate from CAD, but GWAS. With this perspective in mind, and again through an extremely serendipitous cascade of events, I found myself enrolled in an Animal Science PhD at an outstanding public land-grant university. The years since starting my graduate studies have been both inexplicably rewarding and highly challenging, a bumpy road with with dozens of gleaming roadside attractions. While I’m unsure as to what exactly the future holds, I’m confident it will include a combination of fish, computers, and an agar plate or two. Welcome to my site!