FROM THE DESK OF THE DEAN

On Wednesday, Oct. 4, we will dedicate Patterson Hall in a special ceremony I hope many of you will be able to attend.

This will just be the first of many exciting events scheduled in the College of Veterinary Medicine in the coming months and years. In what may be a first in Iowa State University’s history, we are planning a dedication ceremony and groundbreaking ceremony on the same day.

From the Dean

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

It’s never a dull moment in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Whether I’m walking down the halls and seeing the excitement our graduate and professional students have for their career paths or encountering a satisfied client in the Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center, the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory or any of our service units, this is just a fun place to work and study.

This past year was an example of even more excitement in the College. As you know we completed our year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of Dr. Frederick Douglass Patterson’s graduation from the College of Veterinary Medicine. You can read more about this celebration and Dr. Patterson’s enduring legacy elsewhere in this issue of the Gentle Doctor

Our celebration concluded with the announcement that the Board of Regents approved naming the main academic building, Frederick Douglass Patterson Hall. This honor is long overdue and will serve as a daily reminder of the impact this distinguished Iowa State graduate has had, and continues to have, on veterinary medicine, higher education, human rights, and opportunity for all around the globe.

For the past 24 months, Phase 1 of the new Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory has risen just across from Patterson Hall. Thanks to the generous support from the State of Iowa and our many alumni, friends, and stakeholders, the VDL will be a one-of-a-kind facility that will continue Iowa State’s commitment to agriculture not only in our state, but throughout the world.

Thanks again to the State of Iowa, planning is already underway for Phase 2 of the VDL. Construction is scheduled to begin on that part of the project this spring – hence the same day dedication/groundbreaking ceremony. More details will be forthcoming on this event later this year in our monthly alumni e-newsletter.

And we’re not finished celebrating. Phase 2 of the VDL will be completed in the fall of 2026. The 50th anniversary of Patterson Hall will be commemorated that same year and we’re already starting to think about our upcoming 150th anniversary in 2029.

Like I mentioned earlier, there’s never a dull moment in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Dan Grooms, DVM, PhD

Dr. Stephen G. Juelsgaard Dean of Veterinary Medicine

CVM Places High in Three Rankings

The College of Veterinary Medicine has risen in three separate 2023 rankings of veterinary colleges in the United States and globally.

EduRank ranked Iowa State 11th globally and fifth among U.S. veterinary schools. This independent metric-ranking utilizes the world’s largest scholarly papers database to rank universities, along with non-academic prominence and alumni popularity indicators.

Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) ranked Iowa State 16th overall in the world rankings and ninth in the United States. QS measures academic and employer reputations and the number o times faculty research papers have been cited.

The latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of veterinary colleges, which are updated every three years, lists Iowa State as 11th out of 33 veterinary schools that were ranked. In the last rankings, CVM came in at 14th overall.

Accreditation Prep

The College of Veterinary Medicine hosted a Mock Site Visit for the AVMA-COE accreditation process last spring. Dr. Emma Read, associate dean for the professional programs at The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine, and Dr. Susan Tornquist, dean of the Oregon State University College of Veterinary Medicine, were members of the site visit team. They met with faculty, staff and students and toured the College’s facilities.

Thippeswamy Named Lloyd Professor

Dr. Thimmasettappa Thippeswamy, professor of biomedical sciences, has been appointed as the newest holder of the W. Eugene and Linda R. Lloyd Endowed Professorship in Veterinary Medicine.

Thippeswamy’s research focuses on the field of epilepsy, and he recently received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) U01 award, which is one of the most prestigious translational research funding grants in the United States. He has served as the principal investigator on five NIH grants on neurotoxicity totaling $5.4 million since 2017. Recently, he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Epilepsy Society (FAES). The FAES designation is an honor that demonstrates professional accomplishments and dedication in the field of epilepsy through research. He was also named a Dean’s Faculty Fellow from 2019-2022 in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

#4000

Stella, a two-year-old cat from the Animal Rescue of Carroll, was patient number 4,000 in the Community Outreach Program. Thirdyear students Amanda Stuart, Sara Crim and Melissa Svoboda were Stella’s surgical team. Photo: Dave Gieseke

In the classroom, Thippeswamy is an award-winning, student-centered professor of veterinary anatomy. He was selected for the Zoetis Distinguished Veterinary Teaching Award in the College of Veterinary Medicine by students in 2017 and that same year he was a nominee for the AAVMC Distinguished Veterinary Teacher Award. A year later he received the CVM Award for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching and in 2019 he received a Miller Teaching Fellowship from Iowa State University.

The Lloyd Endowed Professorship in Veterinary Medicine was established by Eugene Lloyd (’49 DVM, ’70 PhD) and his wife Linda.

Faculty and Staff Notes

• Dr. Gayle Brown, lead public health veterinarian at the Center for Food Security and Public Health and senior lecturer in veterinary microbiology and preventive medicine, has been named to the 2023 Women Impacting ISU calendar by the Catt Center for Women and Politics.

• Dr. Locke Karriker, Morrill Professor of veterinary diagnostic and production animal medicine and the Dr. Douglas and Ann Gustafson Professor for Teaching Excellence in Veterinary Medicine, has been installed as vice president of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians.

• Chimene Peterson, veterinary technician II in the Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center, is the recipient of the “Credentialed Veterinary Technician” Veterinary Heroes recognition by dvm360.

• Dr. Paul Plummer, associate dean of research and graduate studies and Anderson Chair of Veterinary Sciences, has been appointed chair of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Combatting Antimicrobial Resistant Bacteria.

• Dr. Yuko Sato, associate professor of veterinary diagnostic and production animal medicine, was featured at a Congressional Briefing on “The Value of Large Animal Research in Biomedical, Veterinary, and Agricultural Research Progress.”

• Dr. Jessica Ward, Phyllis M. Clark Endowed Professor, associate professor of veterinary clinical sciences, and assistant dean of extramural student programs, is the inaugural recipient of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine’s William R. Fenner Early Career Award for Outstanding Service.

Comparative Data Report Released

The annual Comparative Data Report from the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC) has been released and the following are some of the highlights of the report for the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Dvm Students

• Total Enrollment: #2 (680 DVM students)

• Applications: #7 (1,967 applicants)

Tuition And Fees

• Resident Total Cost of Education

(Total 4 Years): 4th lowest ($177,805)

• Non-Resident Total Cost of Education (Total 4 Years): 11th lowest ($295,785)

• Cost of Living in Ames: Lowest ($15,029)

• Mean Educational Debt: 12th lowest ($153,545)

• Financial Assistance: #5 ($2,904,600)

Research Funding Expenditures

• USDA: #2 ($5,796,734)

• Department of Defense: #5 ($886,706)

• Industry: #5 ($3,039,444)

• National Science Foundation: #6 ($333,309)

Budget

• Gift and Endowment Income: #11 ($8.9 million)

• Endowment size: #9 ($95.9 million)

Dr. Mark Lyte, professor of veterinary microbiology and preventive medicine and the W. Eugene Lloyd Chair in Toxicology, will work with Norwegian researchers over the next three years to see if intensive handling methods are making farmed salmon more susceptible to bacterial diseases.

Lyte, who has pioneered the study of how stress hormones can directly stimulate pathogen growth, will be working with the Norwegian Veterinary Institute to determine if stress hormones produced by the fish are promoting bacterial growth and subsequently increased infections.

“All of this handling is surely very stressful to the fish,” Lyte said. “Imagine if you were parboiled for a while. You wouldn’t like it. Can then we ask, ‘What is part of the stress response? ” lyze testing data from veterinary diagnostic labs to detect disease trends as they emerged, providing producers with an early warning system to prompt preventative responses such as increasing monitoring and heightening biosecurity measures.

“The SDRS provides that foundational data to educate the industry about pathogen activity in swine populations,” Linhares said. “For the first time, it’s systematic and reported widely. It’s really a matter of knowing what’s out there and understanding that you’re not in the dark.” with an easy-to-use web-visualization interface,” Trevisan said. A machine that holds more than 5,000 samples on a plate no wider than a couple of postage stamps is among the innovations that could vastly enhance molecular diagnostic testing capacity at the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, advancements that would make tests more affordable and future pandemicdriven surges easier to handle.

The initiative started with the labs at Iowa State and the University of Minnesota, collecting testing data for one pathogen. Now the consortium has five members – including the state-run lab in Ohio and labs at South Dakota State University and Kansas State University –and tracks seven pathogens, with breakdowns by location, age, farm type, and specimen type.

After pioneering a system to improve swine health by collecting and publicizing pathogen testing results from large public veterinary laboratories across the Midwest, a team led by College of Veterinary Medicine faculty is planning to bore even deeper to glean more insight from the vast data set.

With a grant from the Swine Health Information Center (SHIC), the Swine Disease Reporting System (SDRS) was founded six years ago by Dr. Daniel Linhares, associate professor of veterinary diagnostic and production animal medicine and Roy A. Schultz Professor in Swine Medicine. The goal was to compile and ana-

A College of Veterinary Medicine project has been selected for seed funding support from Iowa State’s Office of the President and are “viewed as investments in the future of Iowa State University.”

Dr. Giovani Trevisan, assistant professor of veterinary diagnostic and production animal medicine, is leading a team that is developing and implementing a web-interface for real-time analysis and visualization of animal health threats.

“The products generated will provide stakeholders a much-needed powerful computational tool to detect new and emerging PRRSV strains coupled

The “SmartChip” quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) testing technology, in combination with a separate 384-sample system that can run 24 hours a day with limited staffing thanks to automated handling features, would give the VDL a needed increase in the volume of diagnostic tests it can process, said Dr. Rahul Nelli, research assistant professor of veterinary diagnostic and production animal medicine.

“The historical patterns of pathogens are changing, so we need to be prepared for risks we haven’t seen before. Having this high-throughput capability will allow us to meet industry needs, providing more cost-efficient diagnostic tests as the need for testing grows,” he said.

Nelli and his VDL colleagues were awarded a nearly $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to help refine the use of the high-volume testing methods to prepare for future disease outbreaks. Researchers will ensure that the novel high-volume testing methods are accurate and can integrate with existing systems to track and report test results.