Q: What is your current job title and what are the responsibilities of your position?

A: I’m a senior veterinarian at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which is an umbrella organization and includes the Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, Queens Zoo, and the New York Aquarium— along with a separate international conservation program. I am based at the Bronx Zoo (the largest of the WCS institutions), but I also provide veterinary care for all the other zoos. I also manage the clinical veterinary technicians.

Q: Can you provide a brief description of your career path after graduation?

A: During veterinary school, I took AQUAVET I and II and loved them. Dr. Paul Bowser at Cornell’s Microbiology and Immunology Department was the program lead at the time, so I got to know him well. He offered me a post-doctorate position after graduation, so I worked in his lab for a year investigating causes of mortality events in wild fish and participating in various research projects. After this, I completed a one-year wildlife internship at Tufts’ Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, then went back to Cornell for a three-year zoological residency. After my residency and spending a year as a faculty member at Cornell, I joined Zoo New England as a staff veterinarian in Boston, Massachusetts. After six years, I joined WCS and have been here for nearly eight years.

Q: Why did you decide to pursue a career in this field?

A: My father worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for his entire career. I was always interested in wildlife. During my undergraduate years, I volunteered at the Tufts Wildlife Clinic. As part of that experience, I helped on a research project investigating mortality in black-crowned night heron chicks. We would paddle out to “bird only” islands off the coast of Massachusetts. While searching for the nests, various gulls and sea birds would circle overhead, sometimes defecating on us. We brushed past poison ivy that was up to my shoulder. As we picked the heron chicks out of their nest to examine them, their response was to regurgitate the fish that the parents had just regurgitated to them. I would come home covered in excrement and regurgitated fish. And it was the best summer of my life…

Q: What impact has your career had on wildlife, people, and/or the world at large?

I have a great interest in One Health and Comparative Medicine. During my time at Zoo New England, a medical student from Harvard asked if he could spend some time with us veterinarians on a One Health/Comparative Medicine rotation. This was so successful that there is now a course that Harvard medical students can take for credit that allows them to spend time at Zoo New England.

During March 2020, tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo were the first animals in the U.S. documented with SARS-CoV-2. I performed the exam on the tiger that was first confirmed with SARS-CoV-2 infection. I went on to publish a case series about these infections and a longitudinal study of fecal shedding of SARS-CoV-2. A few years later, I published a global retrospective study about SARS-CoV-2 infections in non-domestic felids. This work was important for helping the zoo community understand the risk of infection in their collections and how best to manage or prevent situations like this.

"If this is your calling, then you will make it! It takes hard work and perseverance, but you can do it!"

Q: How did your experiences at Cornell shape your path towards your career?

A: I had so many amazing mentors, but particularly Drs. Noha Abou-Madi and George Kollias. They supported my interest in zoo medicine. When one of the elephants at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo showed potential signs of heart disease and we wanted to perform an ECG, we didn’t have a good understanding of what a “normal” elephant ECG should look like. Noha and George supported me in doing a research project that eventually led to our publication describing normal ECG parameters in Asian elephants.

Q: What is one piece of advice you would give to a current veterinary student interested in pursuing a career in wildlife health/conservation?

A: People can be dissuaded because they hear how competitive it is. It is true that there is a huge amount of interest in pursuing this field. The comparatively low salary (in a non-profit field) is another challenge. But I always try to encourage students who feel strongly about zoo/wildlife medicine. If this is your calling, then you will make it! It takes hard work and perseverance, but you can do it!

Photos provided by Dr. Sue Bartlett.