Michael Plante-Ajah (ESR 8)

• Hosts: Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO) with PhD registration at Ghent University
• Email: Michael.Plante-Ajah@ilvo.vlaanderen.be

Project 8: Early life conditions and individual differences in range use in free-ranging laying hens

Locations: Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO) with secondments at Open University of Israel and The Lakes Free Range Egg Co.

Michael Plante-Ajah received his BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Ottawa, Canada in 2014 and his MSc in Applied Ethology and Animal Biology from Linköping University, Sweden in 2019. Due to a passionate interest in animal behaviour, Michael transitioned from biochemistry to ethology, and a fascination with invertebrate behaviour led to an MSc research project on how the visual features of a scene influence where bumblebees focus their attention during learning flights.  Michael’s concern for farm animal welfare, in particular, led him to pursue doctoral research on how early life conditions affect range use by laying hens at Ghent University, Belgium under the supervision of Dr. Frank Tuyttens.