To remember
Ego sum qui sum ~ I am who I am
Exodus 3:14
Ego sum qui sum. I am who I love, what I read, what I believe, what I do, what I know, what I want to know and thesimple rituals that I follow. I was what I did and part of it carries on on who I am today. Italo
Calvino put it better:
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences,
information, books we have read, things imagined?
Personal
I was born in Southern Chile. I grew up in Chile, Venezuela and Argentina. I completed my Ph.D. in New Zealand, worked for six years in Tasmania, Australia (and hold an Australian citizenship) and now am back in New Zealand.
Having lived in these countries-and having visited many more-I believe that globalization is a positive trend where I can be a citizen of the world, while still calling New Zealand home.
Years of living under a dictatorship confirmed my belief that one needs to have access to all types of freedom; having market freedom without political freedom, or vice versa, is completely pointless. I feel comfortable applying to myself the description of the reason magazine written by the Columbus Dispatch: manages to offend leftists with its defense of biotechnology, free trade and school choice, even as [he] appalls conservatives by supporting gay marriage, open immigration and drug legalization.
At some time I wrote Consistency can be good when we are true to our best, but it can be a drag when we want to become better. I have to break now with over six years of "backward compatibility", which means starting over. This means that i - I can be self-contradictory and ii- this is, some times, a good thing.
I am married with one son. My hobbies include bike riding, squash, reading and photography. I also enjoy learning about different cultures, and have extensive travel experience. I am fluent in Spanish and English, and with some effort I can read Italian and Portuguese.
I like literature a lot, especially poetry and short stories, although I also enjoy good science fiction and fantasy novels. Some of my favorite authors:
- On top of the list come the short stories by Julio Cortázar. Some interesting pages (in Spanish) are this aptle titled site, and this one contained in the Contemporary Argentinian Literature site. I always keep a copy of "Historias de cronopios y de famas" Cronopios and famas nearby. You can find a page in English. In preamble you can read a very short story: Preamble to the instructions on how to wind a watch.
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Jorge Luis Borges, whose intelligent and full of detail stories and essays have accompanied me for over 20 years. I always think that "To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality" (The Avatars of the Tortoise, essay). In babel I have a transcription of The Library of Babel, a story included in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings.
Work
In a nutshell: I love numbers. There is something magical about them: one can represent almost anything with numbers or mathematical symbols. Luckily, most of my work deals with applications of mathematics and statistics to biological problems.
I am Senior Lecturer Above the Bar in Tree Breeding and Forest Genetics for the School of Forestry in Christchurch, New Zealand. I also am a consultant working on applied tree breeding and genetics. I teach an elective course on 'Applied tree breeding' (FORE436), the tree breeding component of 'Introduction to silviculture' (FORE219), half of 'Regression modelling' (STAT224) and 'Trees, Forests and the Environment' (FORE111, for which I am coordinator).
My main research interests are:
- Very early screening of wood properties. Screening-in or screening-out trees at ages 2-3 years. My interest is on the development of cheap phenotypic techniques (to screen thousands of trees), understanding the genetic architecture of physical and mechanical properties in both 'normal' and reaction wood, and on the application of neat statistical models to run the analyses. See publications 37, 44 and 45 for details.
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Multivariate analysis of progeny tests, including variance components estimations and prediction of breeding values. This includes analysis of longitudinal data and the genetic control of wood properties. For this I use mosly asreml, asreml-r and MCMCglmm, for the first two the most usable reference-modesty aside-is the asreml cookbook. Most updates go now to the new asreml-R cokbook. See publications 7, 10, 40 and 45 for examples. -
Large scale level genetic evaluation (e.g., national level). What are the compromises that we need to accept when working with huge data sets? Currently beavering away on this topic. Publication 47 outlines some of the problems but I am preparing a couple of papers to discuss the issue with details. -
Design of breeding strategies, especially on terms of progeny testing.
Covered mostly in consulting work. -
Definition of breeding objectives, especially of forest systems with multiple end-products. I am particularly interested in alternative economic approaches for valuing wood quality. See publications 11, 12, 22, 31 and 43 for examples. -
System integration, using ASReml, R, Python and whatever else gets the job done. -
Combining genetics/breeding with other parts of production systems (e.g. silviculture, growth modeling). Publications 36 and 48 are a start on dealing with this problem.
In what seems to be a previous life, I studied forestry in Chile (see under education) and my first job was with the Chilean Tree Breeding Cooperative based at the Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia. I lived four years in New Zealand while doing my Ph.D. and then moved to Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. There I was leader of the breeding strategies project at the CRC for Sustainable Production Forestry for three years based at the School of Plant Science (University of Tasmania). After that I worked as Forest Biometrician in Forestry Tasmania for another three years. Now I am again in New Zealand, working at the University of Canterbury.
I am involved in the International Union of Forest Research Organizations
(IUFRO) as the Coordinator of Working Group 2.04.02: Breeding theory and progeny testing, which is a mouthful!).
Education
I completed my primary and secondary education going through seven (7!) schools in three Latin American countries. This was a symptom of the politics and economics of the time rather than of my quality as a student. I promise!
I did my B. For. Sci. (Hons) degree and got my Forest Engineer title (between 1987-1992) at the School of Forest Sciences, Universidad
de Chile, with a thesis analyzing the genetics of early performance of progeny tests of Eucalyptus camaldulensis. I graduated summa
cum laude as the best student of my generation.
Between 1996 and early 2000 I did my PhD in quantitative genetics and tree breeding at Massey University (New Zealand) under the supervision of Prof. Dorian Garrick, who is now Jay Lush Endowed Chair in Animal Breeding and Genetics at Iowa State University. My PhD topic was 'Multiple trait improvement of radiata pine', which included the analysis of longitudinal data and the development of breeding objectives for radiata pine. I finished my thesis on January 21, 2000. My studies were supported by the NZ Ministry of Foreigns Affairs and
Trade, and the NZ Forest Research Institute.
My animal breeding pedigree is Dorian Garrick ← Dale van Vleck ← Charles Henderson ← Lanoy Hazel Jay Lush. In June 2009 I completed my first pilgrimage to Ames, Iowa, so I am a practicing breeder ;-). In June 2010 I was again in Ames, participating in this fine
course.
All bits sowed, harvested and baked in Christchurch, New Zealand-43º31'S, 172º32'E-by Luis Apiolaza with some rights reserved.
A longer blurb and gory technical details can be found in the colophon.
(c) http://apiolaza.net/ego-sum.html