The Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine brings a leading One Health scholar to campus each year to address vital health issues from a One Health perspective as part of the Coppoc One Health Lecture series. This year’s presentation, scheduled for February 26 at 12:30 p.m., in Lynn Hall Room 1136, is on the engaging topic, “One Health at Home: Dogs as Sentinels of Environmental Exposure.” The speaker will be Audrey Ruple, DVM, MS, PhD, DACVPM, MRCVS, the Dorothy A. and Richard G. Metcalf Professor of Veterinary Medical Informatics at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech.
The lecture is free and open to the public. During her talk, Dr. Ruple will discuss how companion animals share our homes, our environments, and many of the same exposures that shape human health across the life course, and, as a result, offer a unique and underutilized opportunity to study how genetic, environmental, and social factors interact to influence disease risk, resilience, and longevity in real-world settings.
Dr. Ruple explains that, while age is a major risk factor for many chronic conditions in humans and animals alike, it is increasingly clear that lifetime environmental exposures, ranging from diet and chemical contaminants to social and built environments, play a critical role in shaping health trajectories long before people reach old age. She says companion dogs are an especially powerful model for investigating these relationships.
Canine companions vary widely in size, morphology, behavior, and disease susceptibility, yet they live in close proximity to humans and experience many of the same environmental hazards. Importantly, veterinary medicine provides a rich clinical infrastructure that allows for detailed characterization of health outcomes, including disease onset, progression, and cause of death. Together, these features position dogs as sentinels for environmental risk and as translational models for understanding how shared exposures influence health in both species.
In her talk, Dr. Ruple will describe the structure, design, and emerging findings of the Dog Aging Project, a large-scale longitudinal study of companion dogs across the United States. Although initially motivated by questions related to aging, the project has evolved into a comprehensive platform for studying the effects of genetics, environment, and lifestyle on health outcomes across the lifespan. Dr. Ruple will highlight how this open-science resource is being used to investigate environmental hazards, chronic disease risk, and health disparities, and discuss its broader implications for One Health and environmental epidemiology. This work already has generated multiple peer-reviewed publications, with ongoing opportunities for collaboration and data reuse across disciplines.
Dr. Ruple joined Virginia Tech in 2021 as an associate professor of quantitative epidemiology with tenure, focusing on informatics and its application to veterinary medicine. Her research encompasses advanced computing, data sciences, and informatics, which are crucial in the work on One Health issues. A coprincipal investigator of the Dog Aging Project, Dr. Ruple also is a founding member of Fetch Forward, a pioneering veterinary insurance data analytics initiative. She has published extensively on informatics and veterinary big data, including notable contributions to the journals Nature and Science. Dr. Ruple also is the lead author on the PetSORT initiative, the first reporting guidelines for clinical trials involving owned cats and dogs.
Board-certified by the American College of Veterinary Preventive Medicine and a member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, Dr. Ruple has been inducted into Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, the Delta Omega Honorary Society in Public Health, and is a Fellow of the National Academies of Practice.
The Coppoc One Health Lecture is named in honor of Dr. Gordon Coppoc, Purdue professor emeritus of veterinary pharmacology, and his wife, Harriet. Dr. Coppoc is the former head of PVM’s Department of Basic Medical Sciences and also served as director of the Indiana University School of Medicine – West Lafayette and associate dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine before retiring in 2014.
The annual Coppoc One Health Lecture aligns with the Purdue One Health Strategic Initiative that focuses on tackling complex challenges with real-world impact at the intersection of human, animal and plant health.