Elizabeth Bryda, Ph.D. is a molecular geneticist with experience in the characterization of genes involved in human disease, the generation and genetic/phenotypic characterization of animal models and the development of various molecular tools for genetic testing of laboratory animals and cell lines. She received her BS in Biology and Music from Tufts University, MS in Microbiology and PhD in Molecular Genetics from Rutgers University and held a postdoctoral position in Mammalian Genetics at the Wadsworth Center. She was an Associate Professor at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, Marshall University before locating to the University of Missouri where she is currently a Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology in the College of Veterinary Medicine. She is the Director of the NIH-funded Rat Resource and Research Center (RRRC), Director of the MU Animal Modeling Core (AMC) and co-Director of the MU Comparative Medicine Program (CMP), which provides veterinarians with research training. Her research program is centered around genetic engineering, molecular genetics, and animal modeling. Her lab takes a comparative approach to studying human disorders by using a variety of animal models of disease, including both rodent and zebrafish models.   Examples of recent projects include testing and optimizing cutting edge genome editing technologies in the rat to facilitate rat model generation, generating and characterizing rat models for the study of COVID-19, studying the effect of probiotic supplementation in zebrafish under stress and rats with Alzheimer’s Disease, and developing methods for optimizing rat sperm cryopreservation and performing in vitro fertilization using fresh and frozen rat sperm.