Veterinary college alum honoree Tierra Price does not choose the quiet life
Tierra Price got the keys on a Friday.
She had just bought the practice. Rather than drive home, she went straight into the building, walked through the rooms she now owned, and let the day sink in. On Monday, she would open the doors as the new owner.
Her first appointment was at 9 a.m. The dog's name was Bella. She had cherry eye, and the client wanted the swollen mass removed.
Day one, hour one. Surgery.
The Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine has named Price, a 2020 Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and Master of Public Health graduate, the recipient of its 2026 Outstanding Recent Alumni Award. Price owns and serves as the medical director of Unleashed Veterinary Care, a general practice in the Louisville area.
Price has never chosen the quiet path. She arrived at Virginia Tech in 2016, saying she would keep her head down and focus on school. Within weeks, she was running for class vice president. She added a Master of Public Health to the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine.
In her second year, after noticing the lack of diversity in her classroom, she founded BlackDVM Network, a national community for Black veterinary professionals. She graduated with three leadership titles and two degrees.
Her first job took her to Los Angeles, where she worked in community-based, fully subsidized veterinary care and spay-neuter programs for the ASPCA. Her second took her to Brooklyn, where she worked in emergency veterinary medicine and traveled between New York, New Jersey, and Georgia as a relief vet. Her third was her own clinic.
Price also works part-time in emergency veterinary medicine and continues to lead BlackDVM Network.
Dr. Dolittle and the shelter
Price wanted to be a veterinarian at age 6. The family has a photograph of her on career day dressed for it.
She credits the second “Dr. Dolittle” movie. She did not have pets at home beyond fish because her mother was afraid of dogs, so her mother sent her to the animal shelter in Louisville to volunteer. Price kept going back.
“The more I learned about it, the more I loved it,” Price said. “So I stuck with it.”
She attended the University of Connecticut on a U.S. Department of Agriculture scholarship, majoring in animal science. This opportunity led her toward food safety and security, and in 2016 she began veterinary college, planning for a career in government public health.
She intended to keep her head down.
“I said, you know what, in vet school I’m just going to focus on school,” Price said. “I’m not going to take on too many extracurriculars.”
A classmate convinced her to run for class office with her. The classmate became president. Price became vice president. She added the Master of Public Health. She became president of the Women's Veterinary Leadership Development Initiative. In her second year, she founded BlackDVM Network.
Cassidy Rist and Valerie Ragan became two of her closest mentors. Rist, now director of the Center for Public Veterinary Medicine and associate professor of practice, had just joined the faculty in August 2016, the same month Price arrived. Ragan directed the center for 16 years before her retirement in 2025.
“Dr. Rist and Dr. Ragan are probably among the first two who taught us how to problem solve, how to see things from different perspectives, and how to come up with solutions that make sense for everybody,” Price said. “That was really my first introduction to thinking about a problem in a systematic way.”
What Brooklyn taught her
Price graduated in 2020. Her first two jobs tested what systematic thinking looked like outside the classroom.
In Los Angeles she gained a year of experience in fully subsidized community care and spay-neuter services through the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Brooklyn came next, and that opportunity her differently. The Veterinary Emergency Group ran on an open-concept model. Pet owners could be present for almost everything their animals experienced, including surgery, where legally allowed. Price learned to work with people watching.
“I gained a lot of experience in building relationships with clients, educating clients, and really showing people what we do as veterinarians,” Price said. “Without an open concept, people are left to their own devices to kind of figure out how things are working.”
She learned something else in emergency medicine. She watched cats arrive with kidney failure diagnosed for the first time, dogs with leptospirosis, and animals whose owners had never had a conversation that could have caught the problem months earlier, for a fraction of the cost.
“I can tell you that this $90 of blood work is much cheaper than a $600 workup in an emergency for a kidney case,” Price said.
Ownership, when she got to it, would be a different kind of practice from the one she had watched people arrive in. She wanted to have the earlier conversation.
Not all of her clients want to have it with her.
‘She looks kind of young’
Some of Price’s clients will not call her doctor. They will, as she put it, “call me everything, but that.”
The practice she took over had never been owned by a Black woman. Some clients who have sat through an entire appointment with her ask at checkout when they will get to see the doctor. Others direct their questions to the assistants.
“She looks kind of young,” Price said, repeating what some have said in front of her. “I don’t know if she’s a doctor.”
She describes these as microaggressions. Her response, as the owner, is structural. Her team works through the American Veterinary Medical Association’s Journey for Teams program. Any inappropriate comment, from a client or from a staff member, gets addressed in the moment it happens.
“We will stand up for and defend everyone,” Price said. “If there’s a part of them that they’re afraid to show, if anything happens, they will be protected in our space.”
The policy runs both ways. New clients have found her by asking ChatGPT for recommendations, which has scraped her reviews and pulled her up for people looking for a practice that feels safe.
One Russian woman came to her because the chatbot had noted her experience with Russian clients in Brooklyn. Others told her they chose the practice because the website and reviews made them feel welcome.
BlackDVM Network had started in the same instinct, years earlier, in a classroom in Blacksburg.
“It grew its roots at Virginia Tech in my second year of vet school, just kind of seeing the lack of diversity around me,” Price said. “That organization is meant to help people understand that there is a protected space for them, for both clients and veterinary professionals alike.”
The ones looking to her
Price turns down the word ambition, then offers her own.
“The sense of justice in me just can’t sit still or be quiet about things that I think are important and maybe need to be changed,” Price said.
Ownership, she said, was about control. Not just over her own hours, but over the kind of medicine she could practice and the kind of team she could build.
She had watched what veterinarians had been going through in the last five or six years: the schedules, the volume, the lack of control over cases, the burnout. She wanted a practice where she set the terms.
Not all of them, she said. She cannot wake up and decide not to go to work. But she can choose what happens inside her own doors.
She has moved her team toward what she calls a coaching mindset. A couple of her assistants arrived with no experience. She now describes them as ready to go anywhere and get hired.
Seven people work for her. By the end of this year, she plans to move into a larger building with room for three or four veterinarians and a staff of 20.
A park in the area has just asked her to take on its petting zoo, which will be her first step toward the mixed-animal practice she has been building toward.
“You have to do it right,” Price said, “because there are people that are looking to you and trusting you and depending on you, both clients and staff.”
She has advice for the class about to graduate and for the ones a few years into practice who are still finding their footing.
“Your work is important, and it matters, no matter what aspect of veterinary medicine you’re in, and no matter how many difficult cases you had, no matter how many difficult clients you had,” Price said. “Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the good things and the good work that’s happening. I just hope that they all know that they are doing something that matters, that’s important, and they’re doing a great job at it.”
