Location: Operations
Project Number: 3022-32000-013-018-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 15, 2024
End Date: Aug 14, 2028
Objective:
Veterinary medical officers with PhD’s are particularly hard to recruit. Those with entomological skills are extremely rare. The objective of this project is to develop a training program for a DVM/PhD program that will result in a candidate with a unique blend of animal and insect training to address the unique problems and challenges of investigating vector-borne diseases in livestock. This program will be aimed at the combined DVM/PhD programs, which are two years of Veterinary school, three years of entomology, and then the last two years of Veterinary school. The challenge is balancing laboratory and field work during the entomology training to result in a well balanced knowledge and experience base that is applicable for work in high containment as well as during outbreak scenarios in the field.
Approach:
Due to the limited time (36 months) for the entomology portion of the DVM/PhD combined program the training must be very specific with a combination of virus, animal, and insect interactions. To accomplish this balance the program will be question specific and in this case focused on bunyaviruses in the United States with the opportunity to work internationally. With feedback from the student, various scenarios and opportunities will be discussed to customize the learning experience to meet the need for a DVM/PhD candidate with entomological and virological expertise and a variety of experiences to work in high containment and the field.
The field work will consist of collecting insects during the warmer months and assessing the ecology (abundance and distribution) of disease vectors in the field. This work will include working with the animals and disease vectors to understand the interactions and the importance of integrated vector management processes. Novel surveillance methods for virus and vectors will be evaluated as will tools to reduce insect-host contact.
Colder months will be spent processing the samples collected in the summer, and analysis of the virus infection, population genetics, and the development of models (mathematical, artificial intelligence, or epidemiological) to help explain the data and identify the drivers of pathogen transmission.
At the end of the project, the program of study will be evaluated to optimize it for future students and for general applicability to other DVM/PhD programs.
