Amber Thornton

I grew up in Westmoreland, Tennessee, where I found my interest in animal science through raising and showing livestock and horses. I moved to northern Utah in 2018 to attend Utah State University and work on Ward Angus Ranch. I earned my B.S. in Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Sciences with an emphasis in Bioveterinary Sciences at USU in 2021. While completing my B.S. degree, I worked on research projects creating transgenic animals, studying mitochondrial dysfunction in skeletal muscle, and developing novel methods of equine estrus suppression.

I continued at USU to earn my M.S. in Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Sciences with a Reproduction and Development emphasis in 2023, where I studied the effects of extracellular vesicle-mediated fetal-maternal crosstalk on the maternal immune system during early pregnancy in cattle.

I am now a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech studying under Dr. Alan Ealy. My current research interests are bovine reproduction, embryonic development, embryonic stem cells, reproductive immunology, and extracellular vesicles!