Please join us in congratulating David Flossdorf for passing his PhD oral examination with minor emendations.
David’s thesis was “Analysis of Dairy Cattle Feed as a Source of Heat Resistant Bacterial Spores in Milk and Evaluation of Contamination Consequences for Milk Quality”.
David started his PhD journey in 2017. In 2019, he was awarded the New Zealand Microbiological Society Student Travel Award to attend a conference in Australia and spend some time in Mark Turner’s laboratory at the University of Queensland.
Highlights from his study were:
- Determining the bacterial spore diversity in current New Zealand cattle feed and milk
- The potential of comparative genomics to trace bacterial spores between cattle feed and milk
- Characterisation of the milk damaging potential of the most common bacterial spore isolates from milk
- Identification of spore-forming bacteria genes responsible for a high milk damaging potential in isolates and indications were found for potentially new gene functions.
David worked for a start-up company, Koru Diagnostics, in Palmerston North, before leaving to join a research team at Waginengen University in The Netherlands.
Thu Nguyen completed her PhD in 2021 on the degradation of aflatoxin M1in skim milk using UVC or Cold plasma. She was the first person to introduce our laboratory to cold plasma technology.
Thu is now working in a Government laboratory in Vietnam.