UFAW Early Career Animal Welfare Researcher of the year
2023 Award Winners
The UFAW Early Career Animal Welfare Researcher of the Year Award recognises the achievements of early career scientists who have made significant contributions to improving the welfare of animals. The joint recipients of the UFAW Early Career Researcher of the Year Award 2023 have been named as Dr Sara Hintze and Dr Jordan Hampton.
Sara is an Assistant Professor in Animal Welfare Science at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, ienna, Austria. Sara was nominated for the award to recognise her impressive scholastic activities and commitment to teaching in the classroom, her research mentoring on farms, and her contributions to public education and outreach within the field of animal welfare.
Through her work, Sara approaches contemporary issues related to animals’ affective states in unique ways. During her PhD, Sara took the concept of Judgement Bias and successfully developed a novel cross-species paradigm for the assessment of emotion in animals. In her current work on animal boredom, she combines behavioural and cognitive approaches translated from human psychology to find out what boredom means for farmed pigs. Furthermore, Sara enjoys working conceptually as shown by her publications on individuality, disenhancement and positive welfare, including flow.
Jordan is a McKenzie Research Fellow in the Faculty of Science, University of Melbourne, and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Harry Butler Institute, Murdoch University, Australia. His focus is the welfare of wild animals, an emerging field of animal welfare science, in which he has already been highly influential.
Jordan has authored 75 peer-reviewed publications, with his current research focusing on the indirect animal welfare impacts of contaminants such as lead on wildlife. Much of his research to date has been both novel and applied, fostering collaboration between animal welfare scientists, wildlife managers and conservationists. This approach has wide-reaching impact outside of academia and has resulted in improvements in wildlife management and regulation in Australia and New Zealand.
Dr Golledge concluded: “We are delighted to be able to recognise the significant impact that both Dr Hintze and Dr Hampton have made to the field of animal welfare science during their relatively short careers. As well as producing scientifically robust research, both Sara and Jordan champion dissemination to ensure that animal welfare can be improved on a large scale.
I look forward to hearing all of our award winners present their work at the UFAW Online Animal Welfare Conference 2023 in June.”
