About the College

Cornell’s program in veterinary medicine is the oldest in the United States, having granted the nation’s first doctor of veterinary medicine degree to Daniel E. Salmon, who went on to discover Salmonella, and the first American college to grant a veterinary degree to a woman, Florence Kimball. Today, Cornell is the number one ranked veterinary college in the United States, reflecting the unique breadth and depth of the College, which includes an innovative problem-based teaching program; leading-edge hospitals, including a world-class teaching hospital in Ithaca, NY, and the country’s largest university-affiliated emergency and specialty referral veterinary practice in Stamford, CT; world-renowned animal disease research, outreach, and surveillance programs, including the Animal Health Diagnostic Center, Baker Institute for Animal Health, and the Feline Health Center; and internationally recognized biomedical research laboratories.

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Our Vision

Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine aspires to be a global leader in animal health. With teaching, research, and service programs that improve the quality of life for animals and people across the country and on multiple continents, the College is focused on enhancing its position as the top-ranked veterinary college in biomedical discovery.

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Our Strategic Plan

Our Strategic Plan

The Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine takes pride in its rich tradition as an innovator in veterinary education, animal disease discovery, clinical programs, and biomedical research. To continue to prepare leaders who will positively shape the profession of veterinary medicine and thus maintain a leadership position, it must creatively address the significant challenges facing academic veterinary medicine. Under the direction of Dean Michael Kotlikoff, faculty, alumni, and members of the veterinary community engaged in a comprehensive strategic planning effort to develop strategic goals and enabling strategies for each of the College’s four mission areas – education, clinical service, research, and diagnostics.

Read the College’s strategic plan

Campaign Priorities -- An Overview

The College’s consistent number one ranking and its strength as a leader in veterinary medical education, animal medicine, biomedical research and public health springs from the combined strengths of its program and the people behind them. Their work has a profound impact on the health and well-being of animal and human health every day and a tremendous impact on the direction the profession of veterinary medicine takes. To maintain its position of influence and continue preparing highly trained veterinarians capable of anticipating and responding to some of society's most challenging issues, the College has identified five priority areas:

Faculty Renewal
Professional Student Scholarships/Fellowships/Residencies
Service Learning and Engagement
Life Sciences Research
Library Collections
Annual Fund Support

Faculty Renewal

World-renowned, the College’s faculty members have all played a pivotal role in advancing the veterinary profession, through discovery, education, patient care, and community service. With many of these influential leaders planning for retirement, the College must recruit a new generation of equally talented paradigm-shifters who will continue to address some of society’s most pressing veterinary and human health issues at a time when faculty retirements at institutions across the country are at all-time highs. Support for faculty – endowed and through the Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellows program – will help us prepare for these impending retirements.

Professional Student Scholarships, Fellowships, Residencies

Access to Cornell’s highly specialized veterinary education program is in jeopardy for two reasons:

• The debt to salary ratio for new graduates is an impediment.
• When compared to the other top-ranked veterinary colleges, Cornell has the fewest seats for veterinary candidates and they are the hardest to get.

These challenges are influencing who is able to enter the profession and the number of people qualified to care for the health and well-being of animals and people. With your help, we can remove these barriers to the profession through endowed scholarships that will support tomorrow’s veterinarians, endowed residencies for those who want to pursue specialty medicine, and graduate fellowships that will enable promising scientists who are working side-by-side leading researchers.

Service Learning and Engagement

Through service-learning opportunities, Cornell students build clinical competencies by providing direct care to animals and develop a deeper understanding of serving those less fortunate. These structured and supervised hands-on training opportunities empower students to speak for those who can’t and to serve those who might not otherwise have access to appropriate medical care. To meet our goals, we invite you to partner with us to strengthen our equipment, supply and travel funds for students in service-learning opportunities like the Cornell-Shelter Outreach Services collaborative teaching program. In addition, we seek support to secure the future of the Southside Healthy Pet Clinic, Maddies’® Shelter Medicine Program, and Expanding Horizons.

Life Sciences Research

The College is a leader in medical research, spanning basic biomedical discoveries, high impact clinical innovations, and environmental and epidemiological studies. Many of the College’s research programs involve cross-Cornell collaborations, and College faculty members continue to play key roles in strategic and innovative initiatives that target the treatment of disease. With a focus on Infectious Disease Control, Comparative Genomics, Comparative Reproductive Medicine, and Cancer Research, discoveries made at the College impact all species. Endowments for life sciences research to advance the prevention and treatment of disease in all species will ensure that we continue to advance the health and well-being of animals and people.

Library Collections

Cornell’s world-class veterinary school is committed to preparing tomorrow's veterinarians to be leaders in the “one-health” concept — the idea that veterinary medicine and human medicine are inextricably linked — which means that the Library's resources must support this long-standing interrelationship. Toward that goal, the Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library has identified the purchase of more ebooks and ejournals in human medicine as its top priority.These acquisitions will also support faculty research. Other areas that need support include:

• Public health and global medicine teaching and research
• Emerging subject areas, including drug discovery
• Business management and pet health marketing studies
• Rare and historical books in veterinary medicine

Annual Fund

Annual Fund dollars are put to use as soon as they are given, providing the dean with the flexibility to address needs as they arise, as well as anticipated priorities of the College. Annual Fund gifts help equip the labs of bright new faculty choosing to teach at Cornell; they fund new initiatives, ideas, and efforts; and they support student needs in classrooms, the library, and labs. Every department and every student at the College is touched by gifts to the Annual Fund.