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Dear Friends of the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health,
As we look back on 2024, we’re filled with gratitude in terms of the incredible strides we’ve made in advancing wildlife health and conservation. It’s been a year of growth, collaboration, and exciting new initiatives, and we couldn’t have done it without your engagement and support.
All that said, it is also a time of great anxiety for the conservation, public health and broader One Health communities. As emphasized over and over again by our research findings and intensive applied work here in the U.S. and around the world, our health and the health of the global economy ultimately depend upon sound, science-based environmental stewardship. This is true for all of us, no matter what one's politics may be. The U.S. government has just erased hundreds of millions of dollars of commitments for work that all of humanity, rich and poor, ultimately depends upon. Whether it's the financial and technical support from USAID, USFWS, USDA, NIH, CDC, EPA or the many, many other federal entities and associated constituencies impacted, this retreat from science and support for biodiversity and the environment, public health, and poverty alleviation endeavors leaves us all more vulnerable to environmental crises, diseases of all types, and political instability around the world. Having been on the front lines of this type of work for my entire career, I believe we must—must—continue to do what we do best, but to not mention the extraordinarily destabilizing forces we are currently experiencing would be an abrogation of my responsibilities as director of our center. We need nature; now nature needs us—more than ever.
In 2025, we are persevering and continuing to find traction, building upon our successes to date. So, on to some good news!
This January, we welcomed Kristina Ceres ’15, PhD ’22, DVM ’24, our inaugural Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Ceres is studying disease dynamics in Asiatic wild dogs (dholes) and other endangered carnivores by applying state-of-the-art DNA extraction-based methods on fecal samples collected in the field, bypassing the need for risky and expensive hands-on animal evaluations. Our Cornell K. Lisa Yang Wildlife Health Fellows Program, focused on training the next generation of wildlife health and One Health leaders, is core to our mission of applying robust science to support sound conservation policy and practice.
We will have a lot of other exciting news to share in 2025, as highlighted in my reflections in the interview below. Please accept my sincere thanks to all of you, members of the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health’s extended family!
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