Temple Grandin, PhD

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Designer of livestock handling facilities and professor of animal science at Colorado State University

Grandin has designed livestock facilities in the US, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and other countries. In North America, almost half the cattle are handled in a restrainer system that she designed for meat plants. Curved chute and race systems she has designed for cattle are used worldwide, and her writings on the flight zone and other principles of grazing animal behavior have helped many people reduce stress on their animals during handling. Grandin also developed an objective scoring system for assessing handling of cattle and pigs at meat plants that is being used by many large corporations to improve animal welfare.

Grandin obtained her bachelor of arts at Franklin Pierce College, her master of science in animal science at Arizona State University and her doctorate in animal science from the University of Illinois. Today she teaches courses on livestock behavior and facility design at Colorado State University and consults with the livestock industry on facility design, livestock handling and animal welfare. Grandin has appeared on TV shows such as “20/20,” “48 Hours,” “CNN Larry King Live,” “PrimeTime Live” and the “Today Show,” and has been featured in People Magazine, the New York Times, Forbes, U.S. News and World Report, Time Magazine and Discover magazine. She has authored over 300 articles in scientific journals and livestock periodicals and is the author of Thinking in Pictures, Livestock Handling and Transport and Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals. Her book Animals in Translation was a New York Times bestseller.

Recently, Grandin has been named to the National Women’s Hall of Fame for 2017. She is one of 10 women who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame in a biennial celebration this September. Other awards and special recognitions include being honored in Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World,” in 2010, and in 2016 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was one of six educators to receive the CSU Alumni Association’s Best Teacher Award.