Tanya LeRoith named new director of Veterinary Teaching Hospital
Tanya LeRoith DVM '99, director of the Virginia Tech Animal Laboratory Service (ViTALS), is the new director of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.
LeRoith began her role on May 10, leading the hospital alongside retiring director William A. “Terry” Swecker '80 DVM '84, who was LeRoith’s faculty advisor when she was a veterinary student at Virginia Tech in the late 1990s. Swecker, who has been the teaching hospital director since 2015 and on the college’s faculty since 1990, retires on June 30.
LeRoith also will continue as director of ViTALS. During her leadership that began in 2012, ViTALS has become a fully accredited lab that is part of the National Animal Health Laboratory Network and the Food and Drug Administration’s laboratory network. LeRoith joined the veterinary college faculty in 2005 as assistant professor of anatomic pathology, moving up to clinical associate professor in 2013 and clinical professor in 2018.
LeRoith is president-elect of the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians and will assume the presidency in October.
“Dr. LeRoith brings an exciting combination of leadership skills, business acumen, and knowledge of the college to guide the future path of the teaching hospital,” said M. Daniel Givens, dean of the veterinary college. “Her dedication to constant quality improvement will facilitate continued advancement of our clinical program.”
With about a dozen new veterinary colleges preparing to be established nationally in the next few years, LeRoith said she sees the teaching hospital as a key recruitment tool for new students. Many of the new veterinary schools and several existing ones utilize a “distributive model,” in which students nearing graduation perform clinical rotations at private and public facilities off campus with no on-campus teaching hospital.
“I think the teaching hospital is one of the things that sets us apart from many other veterinary schools,” LeRoith said. “It gives us the opportunity to recruit students who have a lot of options and a lot of places they could go. I think what we offer that some of the newer schools don't offer is the ability for students to do their fourth year in a teaching hospital with the faculty that they know.”
LeRoith, who was born in South Africa but attended high school in Maryland, graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor’s degree in animal science in 1994 before getting her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech in 1999. LeRoith also earned a doctorate in microbiology/pathology from Washington State University in 2005 and an MBA from Radford University in 2023.
A key goal during LeRoith’s tenure likely will be leading the teaching hospital through a planned expansion and renovation, something LeRoith sees as vitally needed for the hospital, completed in 1987.
“We have increased the number of students since I was in vet school,” LeRoith said. “Our space is still the same as it was then. We have a whole lot of new specialty services that we've started, and we need the expansion to help us recruit the faculty that we want to come here.”
