As a child , Christine Zink loved animals, but all the veterinarians she knew were men. “I just didn’t think it was something that women did,” she says.
A trip to Europe after high school, during which she visited as many zoos as possible, changed her perception. “I saw the power of being a veterinarian – that you could do anything you wanted to do. And I also saw the fallacy of thinking it was a man’s world,” she says. However, women were still in the minority during the years she attended OVC.
She never regretted choosing that direction: “I love that veterinary education is a ticket to just about anything you might want to do in science.”
Dr. Christine Zink and Hobby.
Zink’s ticket has taken her on quite a journey. When she graduated in 1978, she won the Winegard Medal, the Andrew Smith Memorial Medal and the OVC Alumni Association Gold Medal. After two years in farm-animal medicine, she returned to OVC to complete her PhD and a residency in pathology.
From there, she was recruited by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to study HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, which had just been discovered. She is now director of the Molecular and Comparative Pathobiology Department at Johns Hopkins and has identified a number of anti-HIV drugs that are now being tested in human clinical trials.
She is also an advocate for the role of veterinarians in global health and has actively participated in the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, now Gorilla Doctors, established by another OVC grad, Mike Cranfield, who started health-care programs for the gorillas and the people who care for them.
While at OVC she developed yet another interest. “I joined a dog training class, trained a neighbour’s dog for a period of time and then competed at College Royal,” says Zink. “That totally got me hooked on dog training and basically everything to do with dog sports.”
She realized how great the need for information was after competing in an obedience trial in which people kept asking her questions about sports medicine. “I thought maybe I should write down everything I had figured out in a book, so the next day I wrote up a series of chapter outlines and sent that to what was then the largest dog-book publisher. In a month, a sizable cheque arrived in the mail along with a contract for the book.”
Peak Performance: Coaching the Canine Athlete was published in 1992; four other popular books followed, including the first textbook on the topic, Canine Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation. She helped establish the American College of Veterinary Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, the newest specialty in veterinary medicine.
In 2009, Zink was named Outstanding Woman Veterinarian of the Year. This award recognized not only her achievements in many areas of veterinary research, but also her support of other women working in veterinary medicine. “In particular,” Zink says, “I went to bat for one woman after she had a baby born prematurely, and together we figured out a way she could continue as a resident while still caring for her baby.”
As seen in the Winter issue of The Crest. If you are an OVC alumni you should receive The Crest with your issue of UofG’s Portico. Need to update you address – you can do that through Alumni Affairs.