معرفی
Professor Francoise Wemelsfelder specializes in Animal Welfare Science at Scotland's Rural College, focusing on the development and validation of Qualitative Behaviour Assessment (QBA) methodologies across diverse animal species and management contexts. She leads commercial implementation of QBA through mobile application technology in partnership with Waitrose supply chains and Medayo developers. Her research program investigates positive welfare states, animal emotion, and passive welfare conditions like boredom, integrating philosophy of mind and social anthropology perspectives.
Wemelsfelder's research has secured substantial funding including BBSRC/AWRN grants for QBA mobile app development and RESAS strategic programs on welfare assessment. She developed the QBA framework now implemented internationally across agricultural, zoo, veterinary, and laboratory settings. Her work examines how behavioral expression reveals emotional states, with validation studies spanning livestock, companion animals, and fish species.
She currently supervises doctoral research on species-specific QBA applications and welfare protocol development. Wemelsfelder serves as scientific consultant for interdisciplinary projects on human-animal relationships at University of Warwick. Her research outputs demonstrate consistent innovation in welfare assessment, with recent publications examining technology integration pathways and cultural dimensions of welfare management.
Honors include the 2021 BBC Future of Farming Award and 2022 Compassion in World Farming Retailer Innovation Award for translating scientific innovation into industry practice. Wemelsfelder regularly delivers invited lectures on animal sentience assessment internationally and examines doctoral research on emotion measurement in dairy cattle.
