Professor, Animal Breeding and Genetics

Contact Information:
212A Animal Sciences
970.491.7550
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Dr. Denny Crews was raised on the family ranch in southern Florida where he was active in agricultural leadership activities and showed cattle. He received his M.S. degree in beef cattle science in 1992 with Dr. Don Hargrove at the University of Florida, and his Ph.D. in animal breeding and genetics with Dr. Don Franke in 1996 at Louisiana State University. While finishing his doctorate, he spent a summer as a visiting scientist with Dr. Dale Van Vleck at the University of Nebraska where he worked on multi-breed, multiple trait genetic evaluation models for beef carcass merit. Following the Ph.D., he was a post-doctoral researcher in beef genetics at the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Research Centre in Lethbridge, Alberta, until 1998. Then, in the ten years following, he became a senior research scientist and national livestock genetics program leader for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the University of Alberta AAFC Chair Professor in beef quantitative genomics. In 2008, Dr. Crews joined the faculty of the Animal Sciences department at Colorado State University.

Dr. Crews works in the area of developing genetic evaluation and improvement programs for economically relevant traits in beef cattle, mainly in the areas of maternal productivity, carcass merit, and feed intake and utilization. At CSU, he teaches ANEQ575 (Computational Biology in Animal Breeding) and ANEQ731 (Advanced Genetic Prediction), and co-teaches ANEQ730 (Advances in Cattle Breeding) and ANEQ792 (Breeding and Genetics Seminar). Denny holds adjunct faculty appointments at the University of Alberta and at University College Dublin in Ireland. He is Division Editor in animal genetics for the Journal of Animal Science, a former Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Animal Science, and a diplomate in Animal Genetics within the American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists. In his career, Dr. Crews has authored over 50 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals, 5 book chapters, more than 65 abstracts and proceedings papers, 15 genetics software tools, and has given more than 70 invited presentations in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Ireland and Scotland. He won the Beef Improvement Federation Frank Baker Award in both 1995 and 1996, the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) Southern Section graduate student presentation award in 1997, and the ASAS Western Section Young Scientist Award in 2004. He is currently President-Elect of the Western Section of ASAS.

Dr. Crews has (co)supervised 16 M.S. and Ph.D. students in animal breeding and related areas, he is a departmental undergraduate advisor at CSU, and he advises the breed improvement efforts of several beef breed associations and producer groups in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. Denny is a member of international coordinated research committees on national cattle evaluation methods and the genetics of feed utilization, and collaborates extensively with scientists in the U.S., Canada, and in Ireland. Dr. Crews currently oversees the CSU Center for Genetic Evaluation of Livestock (CGEL) and works with Dr. Mark Enns as a member of the National Beef Cattle Evaluation Consortium (NBCEC).