Dr. Edith ("Edie") Marshall DVM, MPVM, DACVPM
Dr.Marshall is a MPVM alumni who has worked and traveled around the world, from Ecuador to China to California. Her immediate family has a strong sense of both service and justice, and has largely committed their lives to pursuit of these ideals. Her mom, sister and she all chose health-related careers, while her brother serves in the US Air Force with a unique dedication to building strong international trust and relationships. Edie knew from a very young age that she wanted to be a veterinarian.
She worked as a Veterinary Epidemiologist with the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations and now is with the California Department of Food and Agriculture. As a consultant with FAO in Beijing, she focused on prevention and control of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, commonly known as ‘bird flu.’ China has ongoing problems with bird flu, including human cases and deaths. Edie hoped their work with the Chinese would help them to strengthen their poultry disease surveillance and control programs. She volunteered with veterinary field clinics in Guatemala with the Humane Society and with the AMIGOS de las Americas dog rabies vaccination project in Ecuador, where she was struck by the realization how much helping animals helps people. The recognition of this human/animal interface in the developing world impacted her very deeply and fueled her passionate pursuit of international veterinary medicine. Since most of her prior work in international veterinary medicine was in Asia, she was pleased to be able to work more extensively in Latin sometime, a region that is very near and dear to her heart. She also got to teach ICS in Laos and worked for FAO in Rome on rinderpest and influenza. Excitingly, she was at FAO when they declared rinderpest officially eradicated! She spent 2 years working in Azerbaijan on an anti-bioterror project and also did some work for the Washington State U Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health. She started working for CDFA in early 2018.
She considers her “global family” to be an extended network of devoted friends all over the world, who serve as her family wherever she is. Although she says that international veterinary medicine is a hard field to get into, she says her best advice is to network, network, network! But that has to be backed up by solid skills and proven international experience. She says to take any opportunity you can to participate in an overseas project, even if you have to volunteer a bit. Get to know the people you are working with, their backgrounds, and who else they have worked with. She strongly recommends additional training in epidemiology and public health.
For Edie, the MPVM was a time when she could gain the skills in epidemiology and public health, and it was the gateway for her to pursue her interest in the broader human-animal interface. The MPVM gave her the perspective and skillset to approach problems at a population level, making more of an impact. In her current job of trying to establish a monitoring system for antimicrobial resistance in livestock in California – a pretty challenging task – she goes from the genomic level to the global level, and feels like the MPVM background really helps her to do that.
In her off time, she likes to hike, travel, play trivia, and dance tango (not during COVID-19, though!). She no longer has her cat since kitty went on permanent loan to friends in Arizona when Edie was in China, but she does have shrimp in EcoSpheres that zoom around and make her smile.