The Veterinary Scientist Training Program Celebrates 25 Years
The Veterinary Scientist Training Program (VSTP) is celebrating 25 years of training clinician-scientists to advance the health of both animals and people. An August event brought together program alumni, including Dr. Kim Dodd, the dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University and Dr. Roxann Brooks Motroni, the National Program Leader for Animal Health at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
This dual DVM/Ph.D. program is the second of its kind in the nation, initiated in 2000 in response to the shortage of veterinary scientists across the country. The first class of VSTP trainees matriculated in 2001; 45 graduates have since completed the program. Dr. Fern Tablin served as the director from 2000 to 2015, Dr. Xinbin Chen as the second director from 2015 to 2023, and program alumna Dr. Bethany Cummings as the third director from 2023 to present. Both Tablin and Chen were honored at the 25th anniversary event.
Students combine clinical training with strong foundations in basic and translational research spanning several different colleges and programs aside from the School of Veterinary Medicine, including the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, and internationally recognized programs in Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Human Medicine. Research institutions including the One Health Institute, the California National Primate Research Center, the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Center for Neuroscience, the Biomedical Engineering Program, and the Western Human Nutrition Research Group provide state-of-the-art infrastructure and knowledgeable investigators to serve as mentors.
Most of the VSTP’s training faculty participate in established centers or institutes such as these that promote collaborations and employ evidence-based approaches to solving scientific problems. The VSTP also hosts several student-centered activities, some of which are jointly organized with the MD/Ph.D. program, to create unique learning opportunities in comparative medicine.
To date, 26 VSTP graduates have gone on to serve as leaders in academia, government agencies, and industry research. Eleven recent graduates are still at an early stage of their post-DVM clinical training or postdoctoral training. Thus, more than 80 percent of VSTP graduates are using their research training to advance their careers and solve pertinent scientific problems.
Examples of program alumni include:
- Brian Bird, Ph.D. ’08, DVM ’09 served as a lead investigator for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and U.S. government Laboratory Task Force in the early stages of the 2013-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, and later as the overall leader of the CDC field-diagnostic activities in Sierra Leone. As a senior research scientist at the school’s One Health Institute, Bird led efforts within the PREDICT 2-USAID ($125M) project to determine the animal origins of ebolaviruses where Bird and his collaborators discovered a new species of ebolavirus (Bombali virus), and Marburg virus in Sierra Leone. Currently he leads a $28M project to develop a new vaccine for Rift Valley fever in Africa. Bird was honored as the school’s inaugural 2020 Rising Star Alumni Award.
- Bethany Cummings, Ph.D. ’09, DVM ’11 is a professor in the Schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis and serves as the VSTP director. Her laboratory has been continuously federally funded and has made seminal contributions to the understanding of how bariatric surgery improves glucose regulation. Through this work her lab has identified a novel regulator of GLP-1 receptor function and identified new gut microbe-nutrient interactions.
- Kimberly Dodd, Ph.D. ’14, DVM ’16 conducted her doctoral studies at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and was co-mentored by VSTP alum Dr. Brian Bird. During the height of the 2013-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, Dodd was a member of the CDC group that served to prevent the spread of Ebola in humans and animals. In 2017, Dodd became the director of Plum Island Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory, a Level 4 Biohazard facility in the U.S. to diagnose and study zoonotic diseases. She was then recruited to Michigan State University as a professor and director of the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and recently promoted to dean. Dodd received the school’s 2021 Rising Star Alumni Award.
- Roxann Brooks Motroni, Ph.D. ’12, DVM ’13 was a program manager at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and is currently a National Program Leader for Animal Health at USDA Agricultural Services. In this role, she provides the strategic direction and national coordination for USDA’s intramural research program focused on bacterial and parasitic diseases of importance to animal health in nine research locations across the country. She received the school’s 2022 Rising Star Alumni Award.
- Sara Thomasy, DVM ’05, Ph.D. ’06 is a board-certified veterinary ophthalmologist and a professor in the school’s Department of Surgical and Radiological Sciences. She is part of the National Eye Institute’s Audacious Goals Initiative U24 and principal investigator on several other active NIH awards. Thomasy is a highly productive investigator and identified a naturally occurring nonhuman primate model of inherited retinal disease.
The VSTP received a highly impactful National Institutes of Health grant in 2020, and a competitive renewal of the grant in 2025, making it one of only four DVM/Ph.D. programs in the nation to receive this type of funding. Five trainees are currently supported by this grant and a total of 21 trainees have been supported by this grant since 2020. The grant has allowed the expansion of the program from 17 to 29 students, establishing it as one of the largest DVM/Ph.D. training programs in the country.
Additional faculty members at the school who are VSTP alumni include:
Jennifer Larson, DVM ’04, Ph.D. ’08
Terza Brostoff, Ph.D. ’15, DVM ’17
Jessica Morgan, Ph.D. ’12, DVM ’13
Hannah Savage, Ph.D. ’18, DVM ’19
Kristin Nicole Grimsrud, DVM ’11, Ph.D. ’12