November 2025

Greetings!

Autumn is in full swing, and I hope all SVM community members are doing well as leaves fall and chillier temperatures return to Madison.

Last month, I shared details about the SVM’s commitment to fostering an environment where students thrive both personally and professionally — a key pillar of the school’s new five-year strategic plan.

Today, I’d like to focus on how our efforts will build on UW Veterinary Care’s national reputation for excellence and foster the hospital’s continued leadership in providing innovative, high-quality, and compassionate veterinary care.

A few months ago, we started a continuous improvement program in our hospital, focused on our patient care workflow. The program is directed by Jennifer Fitzimmons, who prior to joining us at UW worked in industry and has certifications in six sigma and lean process improvement. Over the past several months we have also opened our intermediate care ward, expanding our capacity to deliver excellent patient care, and made improvements in the operations of our ICU. This has been a team effort that demonstrates our commitment to the Wisconsin community and to one another!

I'd also like to highlight key changes the SVM is making to recognize and reward outstanding patient care efforts by our faculty. These include a new faculty award for excellence in diagnostic medicine and patient care and changes we have made to our promotion criteria that re-emphasize the value of excellence in clinical activities. The hospital has also recently begun deploying TeamSTEPPS, a program used across the US in healthcare to help clinicians and nurses have more effective communications. We think this will help us build an even more cohesive community and team, as we create the future of veterinary medicine together.

To expand our reputation as a provider of leading-edge, individualized patient care, we are elevating the role of clinician-scientists with UWVC and the SVM by expanding recruitment and securing new endowments that foster clinical innovation. As one example, the new Ryley Clinical Innovation Fund has supported the introduction of advanced cardiac procedures for animals with heart disease, developed improved diagnostic and treatment options for dogs with nasal infections and cancer, and enabled exploration of new therapies for chylothorax.

These are just a few of the exciting things happening here.

Until next time...

On, Wisconsin!

Jon

Elevating educational excellence and support

Effective this month, Liddy Alvarez (Department of Medical Sciences) will be taking on additional responsibilities to foster opportunities for early clinical experience for our DVM students. The new director of early clinical experiences role fundamentally invests in students' education by developing, overseeing, and maintaining the early clinical experiences curriculum, ensuring it aligns with programmatic goals and accreditation requirements and promotes a seamless transition from classroom to clinical practice.

While the official title Alvarez is taking on is new, the commitment to developing students’ skills and talents in intentional ways is a cornerstone of the SVM educational mission. In spring of 2023, Jessica Pritchard (Department of Medical Sciences) began serving as the school’s director of clinical assessment, aligning assessment in clinical rotations with CBVE competencies and spearheading the development and implementation of a standardized competency-based rubric (ITER) for student evaluations.

“When we talk about investment — facilities, technology, research, recruiting and retention, and clinical trials, to name a few — our investment in education underlies everything else,” says Dean Jonathan Levine. “The work faculty members like Jess and Liddy are doing centers on ensuring that everyone learning here has meaningful and relevant educational experiences and opportunities on all fronts and at all levels, from first-year students to those wrapping up their residencies.”

Look for an in-depth feature about this critical aspect of teaching and learning next semester.

UWVC continuous improvement:

Soft tissue surgery workflow pilot

UW Veterinary Care (UWVC) is making strong progress with its continuous improvement strategy, demonstrated by our successful five-week soft tissue surgery workflow pilot. Grounded in lean principles, the initiative empowers staff closest to the work to collaboratively solve process problems.

The cross-functional Kaizen team (“Kaizen” is a Japanese word that means “change for better”) worked to streamline surgery workflow using data and their own professional experience. They removed process waste with improvements that include duration-based scheduling, prioritizing the "easiest" cases first, and proactive communication to align timing expectations across teams.

The pilot yielded strong results from Sept. 15 to Oct. 17:

93% of soft tissue surgeries were completed before 5 p.m., outperforming baseline and nearing the target.
The team maintained a 95% to 100% success rate for getting surgery orders to anesthesia before 3 p.m.
On-time patient arrival improved from 80% to 90% and rose from 43% to 83% for surgery.

Given the pilot’s success, UWVC will launch Phase 2, expanding testing to include Orthopedic surgery. The goal is to incorporate all surgery services into this improved workflow by year’s end, further embedding continuous improvement into UWVC operations.

Stay tuned for more updates on this initiative and related programs.

SVM news briefs

Congratulations to the 2025 Summer Scholars who were recognized for their poster presentation at last month’s Fall Research Day. Julia Gritzman (DVMx’28) and Benjamin Veenstra (DVMx’27) tied for first prize, while Ariana McMiller (’19 DVMx’28) and Katelyn Major (’22 DVMx’28) took home second and third place respectively.
Susannah Sample (MS’07 DVM’09 PhD’11; Department of Surgical Sciences) was recognized with the Advancing Translational Research and Science Pilot Award by UW-Madison’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Her work studies a newly discovered nerve disease in older Labrador retrievers that mimics human age-related nerve damage, hoping it will lead to better treatments for both animals and people.
The SVM extends a warm welcome to Mark Thomas Jr., who will join us Nov. 16 as the school’s new facilities director. Mark comes to the SVM from UW-Madison’s Facilities Planning & Management team, where he currently serves as a facilities specialist. Mark will take over the role from Jesse Waters, who retires effective Dec. 23. Stay tuned for details about this transition as we get Mark on board and acknowledge all of Jesse’s great work.
Professor Emeritus Chet Thomas, a founding faculty member of the Department of Pathobiological Sciences, passed away last month. He will be missed by his colleagues, friends, and many former students. The SVM extends its condolences to Chet’s wife, Donna, and his family.
With support from LaTasha Crawford (Department of Pathobiological Sciences), Emily Tran, a Comparative Biomedical Sciences graduate program student, produced two of the 13 winning images in the 2025 Cool Science Image Contest. The campus-wide contest showcases the research, innovation, scholarship, and curiosity of the UW–Madison community.
Congratulations to Ethan Elazegui (DVMx’26), who won the poster presentation award at the Veterinary Dental Forum in San Antonio.
Heidi Kellihan (Department of Medical Sciences) was recently voted president-elect of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (Cardiology).
Anthony Bachhuber joined UWVC as a new night ward veterinary nurse. Welcome aboard, Anthony!
Casey Boyer recently joined the SVM as Maddie’s clinical instructor of shelter medicine. The SVM thanks Maddie’s Fund for supporting this position.

Media mentions

Keith Poulsen (’00 DVM’04 PhD’12; Department of Medical Sciences; director, Wisconsin Diagnostic Veterinary Laboratory) continues to be a leading expert nationwide on the spread of H5N1 avian flu. Click here to see a list of recent H5N1-related news stories that include the SVM and WVDL.
A recent publication from Tony Goldberg (Department of Pathobiological Sciences) discussing a rare parasite he discovered in his armpit after working in the field has been discussed in Science, Nature, and DongA Science.
Calico Schmidt (’88 DVM’92; Department of Pathobiological Sciences) spoke with The Farmer’s Dog Digest about how long it takes for objects to pass through a dog’s digestive system. If your dog eats something they shouldn’t Schmidt recommends calling your veterinarian right away.
Elias Wolfs (Department of Surgical Sciences) and fourth-year student Ethan Elazegui (DVMx’26) were featured on a recent episode of the Veterinary Vertex Podcast. They discussed their research on vital pulp therapy in dogs.
Research conducted by Mackenzie Pellin (’06 DVM’11; Department of Medical Sciences) that suggests dogs can be trained to detect cancer biomarkers in other dogs’ saliva was cited in a recent Healthcare Brew story. The piece examines efforts from a UK charity to develop an “e-nose” to help detect cancer.