Student and Alumni Profiles

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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