Carmen Alonso

CARMEN_NICKTROCHIL

Carmen Alonso

DATA ANALYST AND ANIMAL HEALTH CONSULTANT

+34 686 495 877

carmenalonso@upnorth.es

  • Doctor in Veterinary Medicine (UCM)
  • MSc in Population Medicine (UMN)
  • PhD in Population Medicine (UMN)
  • Former senior consultant at Elanco Knowledge Solutions 

"We improve and optimyze the production practices through the analysis of data collected by our clients."

Curriculum

Born and raised in Madrid and an adopted Catalonian. I am passionate about swine production and an expert in population veterinary medicine. My every day goal is to help swine producers to be more efficient  by analyzing their farm data, both production and health related, while keeping a special focus on biosecurity to avoid the introduction of new diseases in the farm. I received my doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 2003 and specialized in swine production with the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona in 2004.

I worked with several different swine production companies and independent producers as a health and production consultant until 2010. In the following two years I worked as a Research Assitant in the University of Minnesota whilst completing my Master´s degree with the title: “The use of Air Filtration and its economic analysis for the entry of the PRRS virus into large sow herds within swine dense regions”. During that time I worked with high biosecurity swine farms analyzing the efficiency (both from the epidemiological and economic perspective) of the air filtration system to avoid PRRSv introduction. My focus was to review all the biosecurity points with special emphasis on creating standard operating procedures and audits of the air filtration systems in farms located in high swine dense regions.

Later, I completed my training in airborne related diseases with my doctorate in 2016 (“Concentration, size distribution, and control of swine viruses associated with airborne particles”). During my PhD I learnt the importance of sampling methodologies and large data set analysis as a way to understand the epidemiology of diseases (respiratory, systemic and digestive) whose infectious agents can be aerosolized and travel long distances with the potential of spreading to neighbouring herds.

I joined the Elanco global team as a senior consultant in the analytic swine division of the Elanco Knowledge Solutions (EKS) division in 2016. The goal of that department was the development and implementation of new technologies in animal production in order to optimize the efficiency of production by analyzing the data. Recently, I have created Upnorth together with Carles Vilalta. Upnorth is an  independent data analysis company that focuses on  animal health and production. We offer advice to companies that want to improve and optimize their productive efficiency. We help them to learn the potential of the data that they generate. We believe that this is the only way to understand, solve and overcome the everyday problems that they face and to predict the outcomes of the potential solutions.