Campus Update

Dr. Dean Richardson to Speak at Upcoming West Indies Veterinary Conference

Starting the second week of November, Ross University will once again host the highly anticipated West Indies Veterinary Conference. This week-long program features 25 hours of continuing education covering a range of topics of interest to veterinarians of all specialties. Together with the Continuing Education program, the West Indies Veterinary Conference also marks the third annual Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine Alumni Reunion.

Speaking at the conference this year for the first time will be an internationally recognized orthopedic surgeon whose research focuses on cartilage repair, Dr. Dean Richardson.

Dr. Richardson earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from the Ohio State University. He is currently the chief of surgery at the George D. Widner Hospital for Large Animals at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center and is a Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons.

According to Dr. Richardson, his sessions at the conference will bring people up to date on current state-of-the-art techniques for managing orthopedic infection and will be “useful for the practicing veterinarian.”

He explained, “One of my talks that a lot of people find interesting is on how to correlate what they see on an x-ray with what is actually happening inside of a joint. A lot of people know how to diagnose things on radiographs, but because they’re not surgeons or pathologists they don’t necessarily get a chance to reinforce what those structures really look like.”

No stranger to the lecture circuit, Dr. Richardson gives about 25 to 30 talks annually at the University of Pennsylvania and speaks at national events about six to eight times a year.

“However, this is my first time working with Ross and this will be my first time in St. Kitts,” he explained. “I’ve been down to the islands but never to St. Kitts, so I’m looking forward to it.”

Dr. Richardson and his team have a tremendous amount of experience working with Ross graduates because about six or more complete their fourth-year rotations there every year.

“Because the majority of my teaching is actually in the clinic, and obviously as chief of the section I have to deal with grading and that sort of thing, I’ve had a lot of experience with Ross graduates coming through and we’ve had good experiences with them in general. Actually one thing I really appreciate about Ross is that I think they do a particularly good job in their anatomy education,” he noted.

During the course of his career, Dr. Richardson has had the opportunity to care for a number of equines, most notably the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner, Barbaro. He explained the experience this way:

“It was a long eight months and it was the sort of experience that you never really expect to have as a veterinarian—to be thrust that much into the national limelight. So from a personal point of view that was quite interesting. From a professional point of view I think it did good things in the long run for the profession as far as exposure to the public that we’re capable of dealing with difficult injuries even though we didn’t succeed in the long run. But probably the biggest thing it helped with was educating people about laminitis because there’s certainly been a major upsurge in support for funding laminitis research in horses, which was badly needed. There’s certainly a lot of heartbreak in losing a horse like that and knowing that you failed to save him, but the bottom line on the Barbaro experience was that much more good came out of it than bad.”

Dr. Richardson’s path to becoming a veterinarian was anything but typical. In fact, he only started considering it after taking a horseback riding class in college.

“I went to Dartmouth College thinking I was going to be an actor. I had no experience whatsoever with horses. They required some physical education credits in your first year and I’d already played high school football and basketball, so I wanted to do something completely different and I saw horseback riding on the list of things that you could get PE credits for. So I took horseback riding and ended up falling in love with horses and became a competitive 3-day event rider and eventually figured out that while I was a really bad actor I was really good at science, so I became a vet.”

But while there is humor in his story, according to Dr. Richardson the decision to become a veterinarian should be taken very seriously. He had these words of wisdom for prospective veterinary students:

“The most important thing is to examine the profession beforehand. Make the effort to try to understand what the profession is about and what the options are so that you go into it with the proper understanding of the available options that are out there,” he explained. “As an educator, I would say that one of the only things that is disappointing about working and teaching in a veterinary school are those rare instances where you find people in their fourth-year who are unhappy, unmotivated and not looking forward to their career, and I think that’s sad. And often it’s because they didn’t understand what they were doing in the first place. So I think it’s important, even if you’re quite young, to scrutinize the options of the profession and make every effort to understand what it’s all about.”