Amber Thornton

I grew up in Westmoreland, Tennessee, where I was active in 4-H and FFA and showed livestock and horses. I moved to northern Utah in 2018 to attend attend Utah State University and work on Ward Angus Ranch. I graduated from USU with a B.S. in Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Sciences with an emphasis in Bioveterinary Sciences in 2021. While completing my B.S. degree, I worked on research projects creating transgenic animals, studying mitochondrial dysfunction in skeletal muscle, and developing new 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 Virg inia Tech studying under Dr. Alan Ealy. My current research interests are bovine reproduction, embryonic development, and embryonic stem cells!