Rx One Health alum: Maddie McNelis

Maddie McNelis is pursuing a PhD at UC Santa Cruz, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, studying maternal care and lactation in wildlife.

What prompted you to pursue your career path?

I wanted to be a veterinarian for my whole life and then got to college. Then decided i wanted to be a doctor, then decided maybe not actually. I fell in love with wildlife biology but didn’t really see myself in biology for awhile. I didn’t really have access to the type of people that I felt similar to until I started doing fieldwork. 

And then I felt like my skills and my people skills and also my excitement for the outdoors all kind of meshed together - my love for people and my love for animals, I love lab work but I also love being outside so it all kind of came together and I decided to keep going with biology.

What made you apply for Rx One Health?

I love my department and I love evolutionary biology and ecology, but I felt like I was getting tunneled in deep into my research and I wasn't thinking about the broader application. So when I heard about the One Health course I was super excited to go beyond other biologists. I work with veterinarians at Fish & Wildlife and i love that experience - i think they’re incredible - so it was really exciting for me to get to have the opportunity to speak with other professionals and understand how they they apply their research or their work or what they do and look beyond my super myopic research - that just felt really exciting. I love the idea of connecting with more people.

What is your key takeaway from the course so far?

I think my key takeaway so far is that - there’s so many that it’s hard to pick but i think that the interconnectedness and how it is possible to be a veterinarian and a wildlife biologist and have this broader impact…i think was so focused on publishing these papers or doing certain things that I hadn’t been thinking about the interconnectedness of it all. My biggest takeaway is that a paper can be helpful to a larger audience if applied properly. It’s all about the connections, and working with the right people beyond your work. I was feeling frustrated with the scope of what i could do but i feel more hopeful about that because now i feel like i can take what I do and apply it to a broader reach.

How can you apply what you learned here at home or in your work?

I’ve been scribbling notes this whole time. I’m really excited to take the wildlife monitoring work and hopefully apply it to our coastal communities that are more at risk and think about toxin cycling. I’m really excited to maybe factor people more into my modeling work and research and to connect those two aspects together - the community I care about and the wildlife I love so much. 

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to an aspiring One Health learner? 

There’s a place for you in it. I feel that all of us at some point said that we feel the other is more qualified to carry out the work or we’re worried about the specific degree we need to get to carry out One Health work, but i feel that through everyone here that I’ve learned that it’s important to have many different kinds of experience and backgrounds - degree or no degree, there’s a place for you in One Health.