Sandra Luisa Rodriguez Zas

Sandra Luisa Rodriguez Zas is a Professor in Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with additional faculty roles in Nutritional Sciences, Crop Sciences, Statistics, Neuroscience Program, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). She serves as Associate Head and Director of Graduate Studies in Animal Sciences. Her research focuses on gene expression, neuropeptides, transcriptomics, and epigenetics, with applications in livestock health, neurobiology, and bioinformatics. She collaborates across disciplines including animal science, molecular biology, and agricultural economics.

Key research interests include studying swine metabolism, alternative splicing mechanisms, dairy herd economics, and maternal immune activation effects on offspring. She has contributed to over 250 publications and datasets on topics like neuropeptide discovery and metabolomics. Her work integrates computational methods with experimental biology, leveraging resources from NCSA and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Rodriguez-Zas has been cited in media for studies on diet and cancer survival, demonstrating translational impacts of her research.