Vet Gazette

Dr. Debra Nelson, Class of 1987, examines a cobra in India.

Since receiving her DVM from OSU in 1987, Debra Nelson has taken her veterinary medical skills down many interesting roads and around the world.

She began her career in a typical fashion by working in, and later purchasing, a mixed animal practice in Arizona. Over the years, she kept busy managing her practice but didn’t stop there. She helped create the first veterinary technician training program in Arizona, co-hosted a local radio show called “Pet Potpourri, The Voice of Animal Health”, and served on the boards of many local animal service agencies. Nelson also travelled extensively, often volunteering her veterinary skills to under-served communities.

Next week Nelson is being honored by OSU as an Alumni Fellow, and on Friday, October 25 at noon, in Magruder 102, she will give an inspiring talk entitled “Opportunities for Growth and Fun! Routine: Never!” CVM students are encouraged to attend; lunch will be provided.

This past summer John DenHerder and Jill Ollivant, Class of 2015, began their externship at the Oregon Primate Research Center not sure what to expect. “I thought maybe we would be doing a lot of lab animal care,” says Ollivant. The reality was quite different — in a good way.

Ollivant and DenHerder rotated through multiple units at the center and had a wide variety of learning experiences. “Our time in the Surgical Services Unit was was extremely hands-on,” says DenHerder. “We were able to join other technicians who were practicing surgical procedures. These included catheter placement, intubation, duodenoscopy, bone marrow aspirate, and CSF tap.” They also observed laparoscopic-assisted ovariectomies.

In the Behavioral Services Unit, Ollivant and DenHerder learned about non-human primate behavior and spent time observing the primates in outdoor corrals, changing their toys to provide stimulation. “Environmental enrichment is extremely important to prevent the animals from getting bored and to improve research outcomes.  This enrichment is provided in the form of toys, music, movies, foraging boards, pools in the summer, bamboo and climbing structures.  These are rotated every so often to keep the monkeys interested,” says DenHerder.

The OSU students were surprised by how much focus is given to animal behavior. “The Primate Center employs a full-time crew of five to study and address the behavioral needs of these animals.” For the well-being of the animals in their care, the center houses them in pairs whenever possible, but just like humans, not every two primates are a good match for each other. “It is no easy task,” says DenHerder. “Singly-housed animals are observed for a period of time to determine which pairs may be compatible, then their cages are placed next to each other and more observations are made before they move in together.  Still, some pairings do not work out and the process must start over again.”

Working with primates was a big change from the more typical internships involving domestic animals. “It is very important to read their behavioral cues and know something about their social hierarchy in order to work with them,” says DenHerder. “The biggest difference in working with primates, as opposed to most domestic pets, is that they need to be sedated for any procedure that requires them to be removed from their primary enclosure.  Another difference is how crafty they are with those opposable thumbs! Despite additional precautions in bandaging, the monkeys still manage to rip off the bandage materials and or pick out their sutures.”

Both OSU students highly recommend this externship to CVM classmates. “You will gain valuable experience, learn to work with an intriguing species, and see how much goes into the welfare and ethical use of laboratory animals,” says DenHerder. “As an added bonus, you’ll get to feed peanuts to patients on the mend!”

Interim Dean Sue Tornquist and Dave Nelson, former Executive Director of the Oregon Seed Council, congratulate Dr. Morrie Craig on his Industry Partnering Award.

OSU Provost Sabah Randhawa recognized Distinguished Professors and award winning faculty at the annual OSU University Days celebration in September.

Dr. Morrie Craig, from the College of Veterinary Medicine, received the Industry Partnering Award and a $10,000 honorarium for his work promoting safe endophyte levels in forage exported to Japan and the Middle East.

Award recipients will be participating in a half-time presentation at the OSU-Stanford Homecoming football game on October 26th .

In summer, the beautiful mountain community of Whistler, British Columbia is a tourist destination for people wanting to relax and enjoy the stunning scenery. But Dr. Erica McKenzie, Associate Professor of Large Animal Internal Medicine, is not a typical tourist. She went to Whistler in August to swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run 26.2 miles – all in one day. Dr. McKenzie was pursuing a decade-long goal of qualifying to participate in the big Kahuna: The Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii.

Back in 2001, a friend encouraged McKenzie to try a short-distance, sprint triathlon. “I barely knew what triathlon consisted of but I enjoyed every minute of that first race and was immediately hooked,” she says. Over the years, McKenzie participated in numerous short-distance and long-distance triathlons and, in 2007, competed in her first Ironman race in Western Australia. She tackled seven more Ironman competitions, hoping to someday qualify for Ironman Hawaii by finishing in the top 2-5 % of her age bracket at a qualifying event.

“Over the years I’ve never been too far from the goal and in October 2012, I finally decided to focus on achieving the necessary speed and fitness to qualify,” she says. “I trained an average of 12 to 16 hours a week, which was performed almost entirely early in the morning before work and on the weekends.”

That kind of dedication paid off this year when McKenzie finished in fourth place in her age bracket at Ironman Canada with a time of 10 hours and 32 minutes, finishing as the 7^th amateur female across the line of approximately 560 amateur women racing.

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Both biomedical science and computer science have made huge advances in the last three decades so it makes sense that combining these two fields will lead to productive research.

The OSU College of Veterinary Medicine, with funds from the Provost Matching Program, is further enhancing their mission to create an interdisciplinary workforce with the hiring of Stephen Ramsey as a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at CVM.

Recent improvements in the speed and cost of using genome sequencing in biomedical research have provided investigators with a valuable tool to study organisms, but it also creates massive amounts of data that need analysis. That workload is handled by computers, but computers are useless without software. That is where Ramsey comes in; he has the computational skills and computer software design experience needed to marry information technology and biology in a productive way.

Ramsey began his academic career in physics. His Ph.D. dissertation tackled the problem of simulating matter during the earliest moments after the Big Bang. “In those extreme conditions, it’s very hard to solve a Physics problem using pen and paper; you have to use computational methods,” he says. That sparked an interest in high-performance, scientific computing.

How did he get from physics and computers to biomedical science? Serendipity.

Soon after receiving his doctorate, Ramsey’s wife, bioengineer Elain Fu who is also new faculty at OSU, began working in the University of Washington genome center. “This was in the heyday of the human genome project,” he says. “Elain was a graduate student at the genome center and saw the need for someone who could grapple with masses of measurements and their huge mapping challenges.” She suggested Ramsey go talk to the center director and the rest is history. “He brought me into his lab and that is what changed everything. It got me on a life-sciences trajectory.”

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