Future is: Sara Derighetti

About the job

Our series "Future is…" is all about the future.

"Future is" is the platform for our young talents who complete their vocational training at Qualitas AG, expand their practical know-how with an internship during or after their studies, write their bachelor’s or master’s thesis with us, or take their first steps into professional life.

Can you tell us more about your studies at ETH Zurich? What excites you the most?

The brilliant thing about ETH is that you never know which interests might be awakened in you. At the beginning of my bachelor’s, I never thought about the further course my studies would take. Thanks to interdisciplinarity, there is a perfect match for everyone. For example, in my master’s, I chose the specialisation in Animal Sciences with Data Science as a minor.

How did you come up with the idea to do an internship at Qualitas AG?

In my master’s, I attended the lectures "Livestock Breeding and Genomics" and "Applied Statistical Methods in Animal Sciences" by Peter von Rohr. This sparked my interest in breeding value estimation. However, I still couldn’t quite imagine how it works in practice. When Peter then presented Qualitas AG and possible internship projects, one thing led to another.

What did you work on at Qualitas?

My internship topic was integrated into the Single-step project. Specifically, it is about finding out which categories of genotypes we can exclude from the evaluation and which provide us with new information, i.e. those we definitely want to keep. Filtering out "uninformative" animals should not reduce the quality of breeding value estimation. The background of the project is the oversupply of genotype data compared to phenotype data, a trend that will increase in the future. The problem with large genotype data is that setting up and inverting the genomic relationship matrices requires many resources. To find out which animals are interesting, we developed and validated various scenarios with selection strategies.

How did you benefit from your internship at Qualitas?

The great thing about Qualitas is that you are involved from the very beginning. Since the internships are advertised to implement certain topics promptly, you can be sure that your work is important. That is very motivating. I learned an incredible amount about breeding value estimation during my internship. I was also able to gain insights into the processes of private research and development and at the same time expand my programming skills. In addition, I was allowed to attend the annual SVT conference and present my project to a research team from the Natural Resources Institute Finland.

What are your hobbies?

Some of my greatest passions are playing the drums and skiing. When the weather is good, you can find me in summer at the Reuss, hiking in the mountains, or on the motorbike. Physical work must not be missing either. I love turning ideas into reality in the workshop or helping my godfather with Wümmen.