She spent years studying poultry science. Then she started asking the difficult questions the industry didn’t want her to ask.
Thainá Landim de Barros grew up in rural Brazil, where livestock farming wasn’t an abstraction. It was how communities survived. She brought that understanding with her when she left for the US to do a PhD in poultry science at the University of Arkansas, focused on poultry diseases.
But somewhere in those 4 and a half years of research, the data started telling a story she couldn’t ignore. Livestock production was expanding and intensification increasing. Global hunger was still rising. The industry’s focus on welfare and environmental impact was, in her assessment, not enough. She’d entered the field wanting to improve it. She was starting to wonder if improvement was really what the industry was designed for.
After her PhD, she took an assistant professor role at Ohio State University, working with poultry producers of all scales. Good job, on paper. But the gap between her values and the industry’s priorities kept widening.
The turning point came at COP27. Watching NGOs operate at that level, focused on transforming our food systems, driving actual policy conversations, she saw a different way to use everything she’d spent years learning. She started networking hard, asking questions about how scientists move into the NGO world, and eventually found AAC’s online course.
The course gave her a map of the sector: what roles existed, how organisations were structured, where someone with her background could actually land. The conversations she had alongside it, with people already working in the space, did the rest.
She applied to FOUR PAWS in April. By May she had an offer. By August, after navigating a work permit to relocate to Vienna, she was in the role.
Now a Senior Specialist at FOUR PAWS, Thainá gathers scientific evidence to improve animal welfare from different angles, including within One Health and sustainability perspectives. The poultry and veterinarian expertise she built, together with her experience of the industry, makes her advocacy credible.
| “The course provided valuable insights into possible roles and strategies within NGOs. It was also the networking and conversations I had that played a significant role in my career shift.“ |
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Written by Dom Altomari
