Our more than 1000 graduates from 87 different countries have excelled worldwide in leadership, academic, and research positions with universities, private industry, international agencies, non-governmental organizations, and governments in the US and 74 other countries. We will be highlighting student and alumni profiles and achievements here. Check back regularly to read their stories.
MPVM Students
Priska Ciptaningsih graduated with both her BVM and DVM degrees from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine Universitas Airlangga in Surabaya, Indonesia. During Priska's study period, she participated in internships at several small animal clinics in Indonesia, and Animal Teaching Hospital at Chulalongkorn University Thailand.
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Jeannie Dial is from Los Alamitos, California and has called Northern California home since graduating from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine in 2015. As a companion animal veterinarian practicing in diverse clinical settings in the greater Sacramento area, she has witnessed pervasive systemic barriers that affect pet owners’ access to care and how these barriers impact all three parties of veterinarian-client-patient relationship.
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Rachel Hirota is a DVM/MPVM candidate at the University of California-Davis. Originally from Berkeley, CA, she received her BS in Animal Science from UC Davis. Her passions include zoological and exotic animal medicine, animal welfare, access to care, and the human-animal bond.
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Barsha Thapa Magar earned her Bachelor’s degree in Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry (B.V.Sc. & A.H) from Agriculture and Forestry University in Nepal in 2019. Following her graduation, Barsha was appointed as a veterinary officer in the epidemiology section of the Department of Livestock Services under the Government of Nepal.
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Kimberly Aguirre is a veterinary student in the dual degree DVM/MPVM program at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. After completing her first two years of the DVM program, she is stepping out this year to complete the MPVM before coming back to complete her last two years of the DVM.
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Henry Wamala hails from Uganda, a country where approximately 70% of the working population is employed in the agricultural sector, while grappling with a poverty rate of 31%. Henry earned his Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine degree from Makerere University in Uganda.
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Ernesto Rojas Sánchez is a veterinarian from Costa Rica. His professional interests are focused on One Health (OH) and the disciplines that this concept includes, especially zoonotic disease and epidemiology. Recently, his research interests revolve around pathogens of public health importance, wildlife conservation, and economic impact on society and animal health.
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Anjali Pinninti is from Kaleshwaram, Telangana, India. She graduated from P.V. Narsimharao Telangana Veterinary University in February 2023 in Bachelors of Veterinary Science and Animal husbandry.
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Pawares Panyasomboonying is from Thailand and graduated with his DVM from Chulalongkorn University. After he graduated, he worked at the Bureau of disease control and veterinary services and was in charge of maintaining the disease reporting system, conducting a training course for officers, supporting the national level surveillance plan and cooperating with international organizations, such as WOAH, FAO, and CDC.
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Yotam Mihreteab hails from Eritrea in East Africa. He earned his bachelor's degree in veterinary medicine at the United Arab Emirates University. Prior to completing his degree in 2023, Yotam underwent a year of clinical training at the University of Veterinary Medicine Budapest.
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Talon McKee is a veterinary technician with 14 years of experience in primary care and specialty companion animal medicine as well as zoological medicine. Talon previously was a supervisor of a high-volume anesthetic and surgical department for a large specialty and primary care practice.
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Vinay Mase graduated from UC Davis with a Bachelor's degree in Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology. He has ten years of experience working with a wide variety of ectothermic animals including reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates, and fish.
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Suwanan Kerdtewa is from Thailand. She obtained her DVM from Kasetsart University, Thailand, in 2021, and then started work as a veterinary officer in epidemiology section at National Institute of Animal Health (NIAH) under the Department of Livestock Development, Thai Government.
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Kura Kawahata is a dual degree DVM student who has completed 2 of 4 years of the DVM curriculum at UCD. Their primary veterinary experience comes from a mixed animal practice in a low income, rural area. Their interests are access to care, one health, and interdisciplinary medicine; their favorite species to work with are small ruminants, especially goats!
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Ifrah Irshad earned her undergraduate degree in DVM from the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. Her MPVM research revolved around the topics of One Health and Antibiotic Resistance, subjects that ignite her passion.
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Yihan Cao acquired her bachelor degree of Veterinary Medicine in Zhejiang University, China in 2023. Her professional knowledge mostly concerns small animal disease.
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Fahimeh Tooryan is a Master of Preventive Veterinary Medicine student at UC Davis. She is Iranian. She studied Veterinary Medicine at University of Tehran then she got her PhD in Food Hygiene from University of Tehran.
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Alexandre Rico Fernandez graduated in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 2021. He began the Master in Preventive Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis Veterinary Medicine School in Fall 2022 and earned a Caixa Rural Galega Tomás Notario Vacas Scholarship.
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Dr. Jahnavi Akula completed a bachelor's degree in Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry from India. Working in veterinary clinics, animal shelters, and diagnostic labs for animal diseases has given her practical experience. In addition, she received training at the National Zoo parks and the Livestock Farming Research Unit.
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MPVM Alumni Profiles
Hikari Seo graduated in Veterinary Medicine from Hokkaido University, Japan in 2023. During her undergraduate, she worked on avian diseases and poultry red mites in the laboratory of infectious diseases.
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Desire Crispin Iradukunda has a bachelor’s in veterinary medicine (BVM) from University of Rwanda in the cohort of 2014-2019 where he did his thesis on Ecology and epidemiology insight into the distribution of Neonatal calf diarrhea in Nyagatare District (Rwanda).
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Tatiana Henry is from Tampa, Florida. She studied biology as an undergraduate at Duke University, where she had the opportunity to study conservation and ecology abroad in South Africa, sparking an interest in wildlife research and conservation fieldwork.
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Lexi Durant is a veterinary student at UC Davis who is stepping out of the DVM program after her second year to complete the MPVM program before finishing her final two years of veterinary school. She is originally from San Diego, California and attended Washington University in St. Louis for college where she earned a degree in environmental biology.
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Yueheng Zheng completed her undergraduate degree in China Agricultural University in 2022. Her professional experiences are most related to clinic rotation. She also participated and assisted coordinate One Health Conference before.
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Atsushi Niida obtained his veterinary degree from Rakuno Gakuen University in Japan. After graduation, he completed a small animal rotating internship and small animal internal medicine internship and worked as a staff veterinarian at Hokkaido University.
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Atika Marwa was born in Tangerang and raised in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. She earned her bachelor of veterinary medicine at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and participated as a laboratory teaching assistant in the Veterinary Microbiology Department during her third year. Then, she obtained her DVM degree from Gadjah Mada University in 2020.
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Yoonsuk Lee is from South Korea. He graduated Konkuk University in 2017, and worked as a dairy vet in Anseong after the graduation. Currently, he is working at UC Davis VMTRC as a dairy production resident, and interested in herd-level data analysis and bioinformatics.
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Nuri Flores was born and raised in Mexico City, where she obtained her DVM from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). During veterinary school, she worked and volunteered in clinical and behavioral veterinary practices at zoos, an exotic animal companion hospital, and on fieldwork research trips.
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Guillermo Arcega Castillo is from Mexico and studied Veterinary Medicine at the Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencias Veterinarias, which is part of the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in the city of Mexicali. Since he graduated, it was his goal to get as much experience as possible before taking such a big step of starting the MPVM program.
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Hibah Abuhamdieh is a Livestock Herd Health & Reproduction resident at UC Davis. She is originally Palestinian but grew up in Dubai where she graduated high school. She studied Animal Science & Biochemistry at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, where she joined the Cross Country/Track team and gained experience working with Jersey cows within the Genetics Enterprise as a student worker.
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Unlike many of her classmates who grew up wanting to be a veterinarian, Dr. Kim Conway’s dream wasn’t realized until much later. Growing up in Orange County, California, Kim was heavily involved in her high school and church theater programs following her childhood aspiration of becoming an actress. She even enrolled at Cal State University, Fullerton (CSUF) as a Film major until she discovered an unexpected interest in infectious diseases and switched to double majoring in Health Science and Biology.
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Growing up in New Orleans, Connie Silbernagel loved spending summers on Lake Pontchartrain in her grandparents’ home on the water (a.k.a. ‘camp’). Her fondest memories center around fishing for catfish, setting crab traps with her grandfather, crawfish boils, eating and laughing with family and friends.
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Growing up in San Francisco, Ashley Hill wanted to be a veterinarian as long as she could avoid math. She dreamt of acquiring a horse, intending to keep it in the tiny backyard. Her parents’ solution was a lot of Breyer horse models. As an undergraduate at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, she found herself looking for a way to fulfill science and quantitative requirements but avoid math and bench science. That ruled out calculus, biology, and chemistry so instead she took geology and computer science.
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Mike Ziccardi hails from San Diego, where he learned to love the ocean, spent free time on the gorgeous beaches in La Jolla, and immersed himself in marine science and oceanography at the Scripps Institute and Birch Aquarium. A close family friend and NOAA scientist had Mike on board a research vessel at a very young age.
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Dr. Edith (“Edie”) Marshall DVM, MPVM, DACVPM is one of our 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.
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Recently named One of UC Davis’s “55 Remarkable Women”, Dr, Marguerite Pappaioanou reflected with Director Janet Foley about her early interest in the MPVM and what that meant for her career.
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A sense of duty led Dr. Rick Tucker to enroll in the US Army once he completed veterinary school. Dr. Tucker was raised in the San Diego area in a family with a strong record of military service. However, he envisioned a career as a large animal veterinarian and a family with his wife Heidi, who was originally from Visalia California.
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The MPVM program congratulates Dr. Padraig Lucey on completing his MPVM and his dairy production medicine residency program and his plans to begin a PhD with the animal biology graduate group at UC Davis.
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Dr. Fernando Mardones is an MPVM (2007) and epi Ph.D. (2013) (both UC Davis) alumnus working as Assistant Professor at the nascent School of Veterinary Medicine at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) in Santiago, Chile. His teaching and research include the application of quantitative methods derived from epidemiology and ecology to study the dynamics of infectious diseases associated with farming practices from local to large scale spatial extents.
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When Retired Colonel Ricord Torgerson (B.S. ’80, D.V.M. ’82, M.P.V.M. ’82) graduated from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, he could hardly have predicted where his Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine and Masters in Preventive Veterinary Medicine degrees would take him – halfway across the world to help people living in conflict zones.
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Dr. María José Navarrete Talloni (M.P.V.M. ‘06) is living the dream. She holds a tenure-track position in her chosen field, has lived all over the world and now lives in paradise, and has done this all while starting a family. Originally from Chile, Dr. Navarrete Talloni is an assistant professor of anatomic pathology at Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, located in St. Kitts in the West Indies.
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MPVM students come to the program from around the world. Read about Dr. Luis Hervé Claude who came from Chile, leveraged his MPVM in a faculty position in Santiago Chile, and is now transitioning to epidemiology faculty at Ross University.
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Many MPVM students are bitten by the bug of research while in the program and choose to continue in a PhD. Dr. Ariel Loredo talks here about wildlife medicine, research, our program’s diversity, and starting a PhD in epidemiology after the MPVM.
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Dr. Robert Lavan used his MPVM degree to eventually become a pharmaceutical industry pioneer in the field of Outcomes Research. Learn about the path he took from parasitology and research in his career here.
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Wildlife medicine is a very important area that attracts many of our MPVMers. Read about the career of alumnus Dr. Michael Kock here.
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Dr. Anne Kjemtrup used her MPVM as she established her career in Public Health and vector-borne disease.
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Our first MPVM/DVM dual degree student is getting her research underway. Click here to read about Laura Shultz and her research on vector-borne disease and human-wildlife conflict.
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