DR. CHESHIRE CAT

My Story

I grew up in a small mill town on the banks of the Connecticut River in the western part of Massachusetts called Turners Falls. I was the first person in my family to attend college. I attended Simmons University in Boston where I majored in biology. I got the opportunity to work at great hospitals and public health schools during my time at colege and got interested in biomedical research. After graduation I worked in Boston in research studying animal models of human disease. Did you know that guinea pigs get arthritis and dogs get an asthma like condition? This is when I got interested in becoming a veterinary medicine and applied to veterinary school. I continued to work in research at Cornell where I helped to establish colonies of woodchucks to study a liver virus that they got in the wild that was very much like human hepatitis B. After veterinary school I worked in small animal private practice for 3 years then went to Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University to get specialized training in small animal internal medicine and to do more liver related research. In 1993 I started my career as a teacher, researcher, and small animal clinician at Tufts.

My Struggles

I struggled to fit in at Simmons University in Boston. Most of my classmates were from large cities and had parents that had attended college. I was not accepted by all my classmates but there were a handful that saw the true me and had the same values I had. I learned a lot about the world and how your upbringing can affect how you see the world. My college years were not “fun” but they were vitally important in shaping who I became and being in the city of Boston opened up so many opportunities for me. The other huge struggle for me was an intellectual one once I became a university professor. Trying to write large million dollars government grants that would enable me to take my own ideas and translate them into new ways of diagnosing and treating disease. But I persevered and got the grants.