When Rachael Schulte was growing up on her family’s Nebraska hobby farm, she learned firsthand how many ways humans and animals are connected. 

Whether it was raising meat rabbits alongside angora rabbits whose fur her mother spun into yarn, breeding Siamese cats as affectionate companions or keeping goats for both meat and fiber, Schulte’s experience showed her the intricate web of connections between people and animals that public health exists to protect.

Her interest in animals never wavered, leading her to the University of Missouri, where she earned a dual degree in veterinary medicine and a master’s in public health. After graduation, she spent five years in emergency and relief practice. While the work was rewarding, it was often emotionally draining, especially during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was working out of my own bucket, without having a way to get anything poured into me,” she says.

That was when Schulte seriously shifted her focus to her public health roots. She was drawn to the University of Minnesota’s veterinary public health residency for its deliberately broad design, which allows exploration of multiple areas in the field.

Over two years as a Veterinary Public Health and Preventive Medicine resident at the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety (CAHFS), she produced videos on chronic wasting disease, organized hospital records into a usable metric for tracking antibiotic use, monitored multidrug-resistant organisms during an infection-control rotation and assessed how prepared Caribbean nations are for an incursion of African swine fever.

Much of her work fell under surveillance, which in public health means gathering health data, whether to track a familiar disease like seasonal flu, catch a new threat early or measure if an intervention is working.

One of her bigger projects had Schulte surveying Minnesota dairy herds infected with avian influenza. But by the time funding arrived, the state had no positive herds left.

“This is the tension of being a researcher in public health,” she says. “You have money to investigate a disease process, but the disease process has disappeared. This is good for the population, but it’s bad for your project.”

Principal investigators on the project suggested pivoting to serologic monitoring, which involved testing cattle for an antibody response instead. The antibodies persisted for more than 20 months in many cases, far longer than Schulte and her team expected.

Going out to sample dairy cattle reminded Schulte that she was a trained veterinarian who could relearn livestock work. It was exactly the confidence CAHFS residency director Melinda Wilkins had been building toward from the start.

“She knew that I could get into an agriculture department and be skilled at what I’m doing,” Schulte says. “I just needed to gain more confidence in working with livestock again.”

Schulte recently started a job at the Hawaii Department of Agriculture, helping to protect the islands’ livestock and pets against transboundary diseases.

“My impact, the potential for impact, is greater in public health,” she says, “even though it’s less visible to most people.”

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