Spotlight On: Osvaldo Bogado Pascottini 
I’m from Asunción, the capital of Paraguay — a small, landlocked country right in the heart of South America. But even though I was born in the capital, my real roots are in the Paraguayan Chaco, where I grew up.
The Chaco is wild. It was remote, dusty, and full of cows. I grew up on a family-owned beef farm, where we used an extensive, seasonal grazing system that actually looks a lot like what I see here in Ireland today. Fun fact: Paraguay has about 7 million people… and around 13 million cows. Beef is a big deal, it’s one of the country’s main exports and a central part of our identity. My childhood was all about cows, horses, and nature. I still remember the day I started school (I was about 7). My mom looked at me and said, “Osvaldito” (a cute way to say Osvaldo in Spanish), “tomorrow you're starting school.” And I was like, “OK, let’s do it.” One day I was riding horses on the ranch, and the next, I was in the big city of Asunción, learning to read and write. During the school year, I played football in the street, caused mild trouble in the neighbourhood, and during every summer break, I went back to the farm.
In 2004, I started vet school at the National University of Asunción. No surprise there, my background with cattle made it a pretty obvious choice. I wanted to be a vet, and I wanted to work with cows. Vet school was unforgettable: great friends, long study hours, and yes, more than a few parties. My interest in animal reproduction really took off in 2011 when I attended a short course on oestrus synchronization in cows. I was fascinated that we could control when cows came into heat and breed them all at the same time. I devoured physiology textbooks and began practicing with my own cows back on the family farm. I even bought my first ultrasound machine — a second-hand Aloka SSD500. While still a student, I travelled to Brazil and took every course I could on embryo transfer and ovum pick-up, both in cows and horses. I graduated in 2010 and went straight into a one-year master’s program in reproductive biotechnologies at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. That was a huge leap in theory for me. I also experimented a lot with synchronization protocols on my mom’s farm, with very poor results, but I learned a lot from those failures. Between 2010 and 2013, I worked intensively across South America, mostly in Paraguay. I performed over 50,000 fixed-time artificial inseminations, 100,000 ultrasounds, and thousands of embryo transfers per season. But after a while, it got repetitive. I was craving a bigger challenge. So I decided to apply for a PhD abroad.
In July 2013, I landed in Belgium to start a PhD at Ghent University. From seasonal beef cattle, I suddenly found myself working with Belgian Blue cows (almost all of which give birth by C-section). Total culture shock. I didn’t even have a PhD project when I arrived. My supervisor, Prof. Geert Opsomer, told me, “Osvaldo, I’d like you to work on subclinical endometritis.” I replied, “OK, let’s do it!” I had no clue what a PhD was supposed to be. So I spent the first year reading and thinking (and yes, drinking some of Belgium’s beers on weekends). One Sunday, after a particularly heavy beer festival in Bruges, I was doing laundry with my friend Pouya Dini (he’s now a professor at UC Davis). We started talking about endometritis and came up with the idea of diagnosing it at the time of insemination. It sounded kind of cool. The next day, I taped a piece of paper to the tip of an insemination gun and tried it on a cow. It worked. That idea became the core of my PhD. Over 3.5 years, we collected more than 3,000 cytology samples, and I published seven first-author papers in top journals.
During my PhD, I met Prof. Stephen LeBlanc at a conference in Poland and told him I’d love to do a postdoc with him in Canada. A few months later, he wrote back: “I have something for you.” From 2017 to 2019, I worked at the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph. I got to work at the state-of-the-art Elora Dairy facility, focusing on how metabolic stress and uterine health affect fertility in dairy cows. I also dove into microbiome research and machine learning: tools that totally shifted how I think about research. A highlight of that time was a two-month course called Frontiers in Reproduction at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Way out of my comfort zone, but it gave me a solid grounding in molecular reproduction (and I met collaborators I still work with today).
Canadian winters are too cold for me. So in 2019, I applied for a postdoc fellowship to return to Belgium. I joined a project between Ghent University and the University of Antwerp with Prof. Jo Leroy, working on how extracellular vesicles and miRNAs affect embryo development during metabolic stress. I got to supervise MSc and PhD students, and in 2023, I officially became a diplomate of the American College of Theriogenologists. Still, I was ready for something more permanent. In 2023, I applied for an Ad Astra Fellowship at University College Dublin and got it. Ireland just seemed perfect: English-speaking, lots of cows, seasonal grazing, and of course, Guinness.
I started the fellowship in May 2024 at the UCD School of Veterinary Medicine. My research now focuses on unravelling the “healthy, fertile” uterine microbiome in dairy cows. I aim to create a synthetic version of that microbiome and use it as a non-antibiotic alternative to prevent and treat uterine disease. We’re currently doing intensive sampling at UCD Lyons Dairy Farm, and I’m lucky to work with an amazing team and supportive colleagues. I’m excited for what’s next and looking forward to contributing to UCD Vet School’s global leadership in bovine reproduction and animal health.