For most of the year, Nikko Grossapoulos, ‘15 DVM, cares for the familiar animals of the real world. But for one week a year, the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) alumnus becomes Dr. Coniferous Forest Green, a professor who teaches Care of Magical Creatures at Frogwarts summer camp.

The theater camp was founded by Grossapoulos’ theater professor, Amy Ressler—also known as Head Mistress Agatha Bumblebone—who, two decades ago, created a camp that explores social emotional learning through immersive devised story drama.

Frogwarts—a play on the school Hogwarts of Harry Potter franchise fame—caters to attendees from third grade all the way through high school. As Dr. Coniferous Forest Green, Grossapoulos uses his Care of Magical Creatures classes to get campgoers—all who adopt their own wizard names—excited about veterinary medicine, and how caring for animals intersects with protecting the environment.

He does so with a hint of magic.

“The days are filled with classes and courses and an overall immersive drama experience that involves folklore, jumpscares, and detective work,” says Grossapoulos, who was honored with the MVMA Outstanding Industry Representative award in 2024. “My science background is the basis for my magic-infused courses."

For example, teaching kids about owls is a natural fit for the classes, with owls being important both for the worlds of wizards in the Harry Potter universe and their nonmagical counterparts—known as Muggles in the book series. One day, Dr. Coniferous Forest Green may have his students dissecting owl pellets one day, and hatching chicks in rainbow hues the next.

“I taught them about feather structure and had them look at feathers under the microscope, and they also learned about the conservation of trees and why that’s important for the well-being of animals,” Grossapoulos says.

In the spirit of the wizarding world, Grossapoulos also teaches his students about magical creatures. The week the colorful chicks hatched, he taught his students about bird feather structure using the Stymphalian birds of Greek mythology. The week of the owl pellet dissection ended with the dissection of a "dragon pellet" Grossapoulous made himself. Another year, he designed a curriculum that taught campgoers about extinction.

“In my courses, I try to inject magic into parodies of our scientific dilemmas in the real world,” Grossapoulos says, who is a senior professional services veterinarian at Zoetis. “One year, I said we had found these old scrolls of creatures that no longer exist, like an elephant that had butterfly ears, called the Buttersnuffleupagus.”

The extinct magical creatures lived in a forest protected from dragon attacks by deciduous conifers. But when those trees were chopped down, that protection was gone, and the animals went extinct.

“In the end, we tie it back to what is happening in the real world. I had everyone plant a tree on the grounds there that week, too,” Grossapoulos says, adding that the species was, of course, a deciduous conifer he called Dragonia ruba spicota.

For his older camp attendees, Grossapoulos has engaged wizards in courses around dragon scale repair, teaching suture techniques on the same suture boards "Muggle" students use in veterinary school.

“It’s no surprise that in a camp dedicated to creativity, there have been a number of promising young budding veterinarians amongst the wizards," Grossapoulos says. "In my day-to-day job, I don’t often get the opportunity to impact the pipeline into the profession."

The message he hopes to impart to his wizards, including his daughter—who goes by the wizard name Paris Purplina Green—is that outside of getting to play with puppies and kittens, veterinarians have a profound impact on the world around us. 

“We veterinarians play a vital role in the balance of our global food, animal, and human safety—and it’s our creativity as scientists that keeps advancing both human and animal health," Grossapoulos says.