A Message from Dean Reed

Monday, December 5, 2022

Dean Reed addressed a full house at the David and Bonnie Brunner Purdue Veterinary Medical Hospital Complex dedication ceremony held April 8 in the new Equine Hospital.

Dreams. They’re ethereal, and surreal. In a veterinary medical profession rooted in science, perhaps they even seem out-of-place. Yet, they are essential to our sense of hope for a brighter future. Dreams seed our drive to succeed at improving our lives and making the world a better place.

This year, the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine and all of our stakeholders, including faculty, staff, students, alumni, donors and animal owners, had a unique opportunity to see a dream literally come true as we opened the new David and Bonnie Brunner Purdue Veterinary Medical Hospital Complex. Since the doors to the hospital complex opened at the beginning of summer, patients large and small have been brought to the sparkling new facilities where faculty, staff and students work together delivering advanced veterinary medical care in specialty fields ranging from surgery and internal medicine to emergency and critical care, diagnostic imaging, neurology and physical rehabilitation. All of this represents the fulfillment of a long-standing dream – a dream to replace our aging large animal hospital facilities, expand our small animal hospital services, and usher in a new era of state-of-the-art veterinary medical education, scientific discovery and animal health care. That dream propelled us through years of effort and planning to design and build the advanced veterinary medical hospital complex that now stands proudly just east of the college’s home in Lynn Hall.

As these developments have unfolded, our college also has achieved many other successes. To the west of Lynn Hall lies our Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory, which is staffed by a dedicated team of diagnosticians who work diligently and vigilantly to run the thousands of tests needed to provide for diagnostic support of animal health and the safety of the food supply. Even as the ADDL sustains this significant workload, it also pursues important advancements, including the development of a new first-of-its-kind vector-borne disease panel that screens for nearly two dozen different pathogens in a single test.

We also are excited at the continued progress we see in our efforts to broaden the diversity of the veterinary profession through creative measures to expand the diversity of our applicant pool. This emphasis has been a consistent area of focus for our college over the 15 years since I became dean. Those years of hard work and sustained effort have yielded results that are attracting national attention. In fact this year marks the third year in a row that our college has received the national Health Professions Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award given by Insight into Diversity magazine, the oldest and largest diversity focused publication in higher education.

You could say, “this is the stuff of dreams.” Indeed, these developments reflect the power of dreams to inspire us and encourage our pursuit of the next giant leap – the next major advancement in animal and human health. But the value of dreams is directly tied to the reality of concrete accomplishments. At Purdue Veterinary Medicine, we are home to both, as reflected in the new bricks and mortar that make up the David and Bonnie Brunner Purdue Veterinary Medical Hospital Complex, where our amazingly talented faculty, staff and students are daily going about the business of, that’s right, making dreams come true.

Writer(s): Purdue Veterinary Medicine News | pvmnews@purdue.edu