Faculty Affiliates

Dr. Alda Pires (DVM, MPVM, PhD) is an Assistant Specialist in Cooperative Extension (UCCE) for Urban Agriculture and Food Safety; in the Department of Population Health and Reproduction. Her research focuses on quantitative methods to identify strategies that improve animal health and control infectious diseases in livestock on small-scale farms. The goals of her research and extension programs are to identify mitigation strategies to reduce the dissemination of foodborne pathogens during pre-harvest on  small-scale farms. She is interested in developing and applying epidemiological tools, such as temporal-spatial analysis, molecular analysis and risk assessment in order to support risk-based surveillance, infectious diseases control strategies, and the improvement animal health and food safety.

Dr. Udaltsova’s research interests include the development of statistical methodology for Bayesian hierarchical data problems, Monte Carlo methods, mixed effects models, population-based studies, inverse prediction, Big Data intelligence, data mining. Collaborative research using these methods include studies of costeffectiveness for monitoring of diabetic patients, blood flow regulation in dogs under anesthesia, personality traits and compatibility in parrot pairings, prediction of pregnancy time in equine populations, photometric redshift estimation in cosmology, estimation of population parameters in cosmological sources with nonignorable missing data using MCMC. Since 2015, she has assumed the Lecturer appointment for teaching annual Biostatistics series for the MPVM program at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis. She is skilled in statistical analysis tools using R-language, SAS, MATLAB, and C programming language.