What education are you bringing with you to this position?
I have a Bachelor of Science in animal science (OAC 96) and a DVM (OVC 00), both from the University of Guelph.

Current president of the Ontario Association of Bovine Practitioners.

What territory will you cover?
Central and western Canada (essentially Toronto to Vancouver Island).

What are your new responsibilities?
I am a dairy veterinary technical consultant with Elanco Animal Health. This involves supporting both veterinarians and nutritionists with company products. The company has recently launched a new troubleshooting platform (Elanco Knowledge Solutions) that equips advisors to be able to identify bottlenecks in the transition period, called the vital 90 days, on customer dairies. Most of my time is spent on-farm training veterinarians and feed consultants on how the system works.

What previous positions have you held?
I started working with a local veterinarian when I was 11 years of age. One of the vets also operated his family's dairy, so I started working there as well. That was my first taste of the dairy industry.

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During my time at OVC, I was involved in a research study that followed 5,000 cows across Ontario for mastitis over three years. (We collected milk samples every three months).

Following graduation, I practiced as a mixed animal veterinarian with Milverton-Wellesley VS for two years before joining the Tavistock group for 13 years. There I focused on dairy herd health, embryo transfer and IVF. I also helped lead our client education meetings and management clubs.

Who has made the biggest impact on your career?
There are many individuals who have helped to shape my career, and it would be impossible to name everyone. The late Dr. Pat Wall and Dr. Wayne Shewfelt are two mentors who both had an infectious love for their clients, and I think their influence has helped shaped many of my views.

Another group that I owe so much to are the young producers that I worked with in Tavistock. Many of these trusted my advice, for better or worse, and I was able to share in their successes and failures as a result. We grew and learned together through births, marriages, successions, barn remodels and expansions. Thank you to them for sharing their cows and lives with me over the last 13 years.

Why did you choose this company?
Elanco places a lot of focus on "living our why." For the company, they want their employees to be passionate, disciplined and humble, with a goal of being involved in food security. This means helping to grow safe food, but also helping in the community as a work team around hunger. For my work "why," I am driven by equipping producers to succeed. I think many of us are given a desire to do better every day, and I feel equipped with some amazing tools to be able to help embrace progress. On a personal level, my "why" is to find the difference between progress and greed, as that is really the only way we can all tackle hunger.

What goals would you like to accomplish while in this position?
I think veterinarians have done an excellent job over the last 15 years of focusing on reproduction. When I graduated, the term "preg rate" (PR) was not commonly used. Now most producers have excellent records and know their PR by heart. As we fix that bottleneck, I would like to see our industry tackle the transition space. We currently do not have many farms with accurate disease recording, and don't have a common measure for transition success. Elanco has committed to fostering this process, and I look forward to the challenge.  PD