Introducing CWHC-Western/Northern’s Newest Graduate Student

We would like to take this opportunity to introduce CWHC Western Northern’s newest graduate student Dawn Abbott. Dawn received a Bachelor of Science degree from Dalhousie University in 2007, with an honours in marine biology. In 2012 she received her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from the Atlantic Veterinary College in Prince Edward Island. From there she completed a small animal rotating internship at the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in Massachusetts. She worked as a small animal emergency clinician for a few years, and then decided to make the move to anatomic pathology. She is just completing her first year of her Master of Science in anatomic pathology, beginning the program in August of 2017.

In her program, Dawn is focusing on wildlife pathology, and so her research project is reflecting that. Dawn is investigating the presence of Tularemia in several rural and urban areas in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Tularemia is a bacterial infection caused by the organism Francisella tularensis. There is currently little known about the ecology of this organism in these environments in prairie Canada. Through sampling of rodents (including ground squirrels, mice, and voles), small carnivores (including raccoons, skunks, foxes, and muskrats), as well as ectoparasites (including fleas, ticks and mosquitos), she hopes to learn more about the presence of the bacteria, and the movement of the bacteria within these different environments.

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