Center training veterinarians for public and corporate work has new name, new director

Nearly 25 percent of the nation's veterinarians work outside of private practice. Most did not know that was possible when they started veterinary school.

For more than 30 years, a single center at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine has prepared students and practicing veterinarians for careers in animal and public health with government agencies, research institutions, international organizations and industry. 

When The Pew Charitable Trusts funded a wave of similar centers at veterinary colleges across the country in 1992, this was one of them. It is the only one still operating.

This year, it has a new name: the Center for Public Veterinary Medicine. It has a new director, Cassidy Rist.

Rist has been on the veterinary college faculty since 2016, building research programs at the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health. Before that, she worked for the United States Department of Agriculture, spent two years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and seven years in veterinary emergency rooms.

The longer way in

Rist did not grow up wanting to be a veterinarian. She wanted to be an astronaut, went to space camp, thought seriously about it — then shifted course. She even briefly considered neurosurgery.

"I like pushing myself to do things that not everybody can do or will do or wants to do," she said. "I like to have a goal and achieve it."

Veterinary school fit. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Florida in 2005, completed internships in emergency medicine and small animal surgery, and took her first job at an overnight emergency clinic. She moved to New Mexico, then back to Florida. Seven years of critical cases, overnight teams and work she was genuinely good at.

Getting good at the wrong thing

The financial crisis in 2008 changed what the emergency room felt like from the inside. Animals that could have been saved weren't, because families couldn't pay for treatment. 

"I was getting really good at talking to people about euthanasia," she said. Reluctantly, she got very good at it.

"One of the things that was really important to me was to help people not feel bad about having to make that decision, particularly if it was a financial decision,” Rist said. “But it didn't make me feel better about doing it."

It wasn't one case. It was the accumulation of many cases and the recognition that a skill she had built was pointing in the wrong direction. She needed a different kind of work.

She went to Jamaica on vacation.

She saw dogs running in the streets and started looking for organizations doing work on the island. She found a woman in Orlando who ran small spay-and-neuter clinics in Jamaica, called her up and asked how she could help. That phone call led to supply runs, surgical clinics across Montego Bay and Negril and training sessions with Jamaican veterinarians who valued the additional surgical experience. 

It grew from one small clinic to a collaboration with the Jamaican Veterinary Medical Association and the island's tourism board — long days in scrubs, surgical work spreading island-wide.

"It felt like I was able to have more of an impact in the community," Rist said. "The work had different elements that I think were more interesting to me."

CDC and the room in Pattaya, Thailand

After her time in emergency medicine, leaving for a CDC fellowship marked another surprising turn. Many colleagues and even her family questioned the move.

"I said, I am still going to be a veterinarian," Rist recalled. "I'm just doing things differently."

CDC was humbling in ways emergency medicine had never been. In New Mexico, she could name the drug and dosage for any size or breed without looking it up. At CDC's One Health Office, she was back at the beginning.

The work she joined was building the One Health Zoonotic Disease Prioritization tool — a framework to help countries identify which diseases that move between animals and people most needed their resources. Rist helped develop the process, then traveled to Thailand and Azerbaijan to facilitate the workshops where countries worked through it in practice.

In Pattaya, a coastal city in Thailand, she sat in a room with senior officials from ministries of health and agriculture across the region and watched people from different disciplines collaborate toward a shared answer using a framework she had helped build.

"I liked bringing people together," she said. "I liked facilitation. I liked the content. I loved being in the room and hearing the discussions and the different perspectives."

Madagascar

Her postdoctoral research, split between Emory University and Harvard Medical School, brought her to Madagascar. She had read the statistics before she went: roughly 90 percent of the island's species exist nowhere else on Earth, extreme poverty, deforestation driven by colonial agriculture, and endangered lemurs living beside communities with almost no access to medical care.

Then she went.

She walked hours into the mountains to reach villages that were told not to enter a protected national forest for firewood while their children were sick with preventable diseases. The animals were as impoverished as the people. Conservation and human survival were in direct conflict, and both were losing.

One evening, walking toward camp through a village, she saw a woman holding an infant. The guides spoke quietly. The next morning, the team left early because the family was preparing for a funeral. The child had died of diarrheal dehydration.

"Here we are studying the interaction between animal and human health," Rist said, "and I'm like — no. People are dying of things that are entirely preventable."

"You can't just elevate one over the other. The environment needs to thrive. People need to thrive. Their animals need to thrive. All of that has to happen together."

A new name, same focus

The center's name change reflects its actual mission. 

The word "corporate" in the previous name, the Center for Public and Corporate Veterinary Medicine, is now more reflective of positions within private equity practice chains rather than the original intention of animal health industries. This was confusing to the students and veterinarians the center serves. 

The new name aligns with how the American Veterinary Medical Association defines the field: All veterinary careers outside private clinical settings.

Rist became its director in 2025.

"If I had access to the resources the center provides, things perhaps would have been smoother," she said of her own transition out of clinical practice. She had figured it out. Many don't.

What the center does

The workforce gap that the center addresses is real and well-documented. 

The USDA and related public-health workforce programs designate certain public-practice roles — such as those in food safety, epidemiology, emergency preparedness, and disease surveillance — as critical-need or shortage areas. Many states report persistent vacancies in these positions and struggle to fill them.

"If you don't have the people, it just doesn't get done," Rist said. "Or states have to run on the basics and aren't able to do more of the preparedness-type things."

The veterinary college's public veterinary practice track addresses the gap from the student end. 

Betsy Schroeder, DVM '16, Ph.D. '20, came through the track, completed the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service program and is now the state public health veterinarian for Pennsylvania — exactly the kind of position states struggle to fill. 
 
After 30 years of operation, graduates of the track hold, or have held, positions in federal and state agencies, research institutions, multinational corporations, congressional staff and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Jessica Plunkard, MPH '19, DVM '20, used the track to build her externship record in lab animal medicine, matched to a residency at Johns Hopkins and now returns to the college each year to teach a one-credit course. 
 
The track connects students with more than 30 volunteer career advisors - working veterinarians across every sector of public practice. A separate webinar series brings practitioners from government and industry into conversation with students and veterinarians about what hiring in each sector actually looks like. 

The center also hosts experiential opportunities with federal agencies, including a new collaboration with the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service that places veterinarians in slaughter and processing facilities nationwide.

For veterinarians already in practice, the annual career transition workshop runs over three evenings online — timed so that participants can attend without leaving their jobs. It covers self-assessment, résumé building, how to search for veterinary positions beyond private practice  and how to identify roles where a DVM credential adds value even when the job posting does not say so.

Andrew O'Carroll, DVM '08, was in small animal practice when he went through the workshop. He now serves as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, working as a veterinary medical regulatory reviewer at the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and serves on the center's advisory board.

A Virginia equine veterinarian came through uncertain about her next move and ended up at the Virginia Department of Agriculture, and Rist ran into her recently when she brought visiting researchers from Uganda to a state laboratory in Harrisonburg.

"We want people to feel confident that they have what it takes," Rist said. "Career decision self-efficacy — I can be effective in determining how to move from one point in my career to another."

What she tells veterinarians

When veterinarians come to Rist, uncertain about whether private practice is where they belong, she doesn't tell them to leave. She tells them to do an audit first.

"Self-reflection is key. Ask yourself questions. Then ask mentors, ask peers, go spend a day in someone else's shoes," she said. "You may find that a few tweaks can fix things rather than completely changing your trajectory, although sometimes that may be the right thing to do too. The center helps veterinarians with that process."

The advice comes from someone who went to Jamaica on vacation, made a phone call she didn't have to make, followed it to CDC, traveled to Thailand and Madagascar, published in The Lancet, and is now running a center that is building the pathways she had to find on her own. 

"I said, I am still going to be a veterinarian. I'm just doing things differently."

The Center for Public Veterinary Medicine's Fall 2026 Career Transition Workshop for Veterinarians is open for registration at career-transition.vetmed.vt.edu.