Pierrick Haffray

After 3 years as biologist in the INRA-Ifremer experimental station of marine salmonids (SEMII, Camaret, France) and in the rainbow trout companies Pisciculture Bellet (Angoulême, France) and Truite de Bretagne (Morlaix, France), I joined (1990) the French association of poultry and aquaculture breeders (SYSAAF, Rennes, France) to develop first commercial breeding programs in the French aquaculture, primarily in salmonids as rainbow trout or charrs, followed by marine fishes as sea bass, sea bream or meagre (1992), sturgeons (1996), Pacific or flat oyster and clam (2001) and shrimps (2009). I'm now managing a team of 6 geneticist and 3 PhD students at the Aquaculture section of SYSAAF that advise 25 breeding companies selecting 18 aquaculture species in France and in Madagascar, Mozambique, Mexico, Thailand and in the past in Indonesia. My main research interests were the adaptation of principles of domestication and genetic selection to aquaculture species in using DNA-parentage assignment in combining mass and sib-selection, the development of high through put technologies to phenotype quality traits (micro-wave, artificial vision, ultrasound, MRI, RMN), the optimisation of gametes collection and larval conservation and cryoconservation, the monosexing and the triploidisation and recently (since 2014) the improvement of disease resistances to nine different diseases based on challenge tests (OHsV1, IPN, VHS, VNN, F. psychrophilum, P. piscicidae, E. tarda, V. harveyi, V. tapetis) and sib selection. My current primary research interests are the development and the application of genomic tools in genomic selection in different species (rainbow trout, sea bass, sea bream, Pacific oyster, white leg shrimp), the application of spectrometry (NIR, Raman) to target new traits as fatty acid composition to improve aquaculture nutritional value and since the two years the breeding of pearl oyster. Past Board member of the European Forum for Farm Animal Breeders (EFFAB), the European platform on Farm Animal Breeding and REproduction (FABRE) and the Labogena genotyping laboratory, I'm co-authored over 100 scientific publications and I was awarded (2019) by the French Academy of Agriculture for my inputs in the development of breeding programs in aquaculture.