While pursuing her Master of Public Health after earning a veterinary degree, Kristen Clark’s capstone project created her first of several One Health jobs that have since made an impact across multiple states.
In the summer of 2013, Kristen Clark, ’12 MPH, was a couple of months into a new role with the Iowa Department of Public Health when people across the state were suddenly developing chronic gastrointestinal symptoms. The people didn’t live in one particular area and the ailments spanned all age groups.
“We were totally stumped trying to figure out what was making people sick. Some of these people had been very sick for months,” Clark says.
On a whim, one of the laboratory technicians tested a sample for a parasite called cyclospora, which can infect the small intestine. The discovery unveiled a multistate outbreak tied to two chain restaurants. Clark and her colleagues jumped into action, working with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and multiple state health departments to prevent more people from ingesting the parasite.
“We were able to get people the medication they needed to get better. Then, in collaboration with our partners, we were able to do the traceback investigation to get the food off the tables. That cemented that I wanted to work in public health,” Clark says.
Clark’s path to halting a cyclospora outbreak started two years earlier, at the University of Minnesota (UMN).
She earned her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) degree from Iowa State University in 2011, and had a hunch that she wanted to combine her animal-focused knowledge with broader work in human health. When she discovered the Master of Public Health program at UMN, she knew it was the perfect fit.
Students who have not yet earned a DVM can pursue both a DVM and an MPH at the same time through a dual program. People like Clark can earn an MPH degree that’s tailored to the specific work they’re interested in.
“The program gave me the most flexibility and also opportunities to work alongside people who had a lot of experience working in One Health,” Clark says.
While earning her master’s degree, Clark was practicing companion animal medicine in Farmington, Minnesota, and took on a hybrid of online and in-person coursework, which allowed her to earn her master’s degree while working full-time. In school, Clark’s work focused on One Health and the infectious diseases that sit at the intersection of animal and human health.
“I didn’t get holed into something really specific; I was able to explore all these ways that animal and human health intersect, and that’s exactly what I love about what I do for a job now,” Clark says, adding she may be working on antimicrobial-resistant organisms one day and H5N1 the next.
While chatting after a summer course, Clark’s professor encouraged her to apply for an FDA grant after hearing about an internship she had at the Iowa Department of Public Health. Clark did just that for her master’s capstone project.
The grant would allow Iowa to become a host for a new Rapid Response Team for Human and Animal Foodborne Outbreaks, a collaboration between states that allows them to respond to disease outbreaks more quickly and efficiently. Thanks to her capstone, Clark secured the grant, which funded her first job out of her MPH program. It was there that Clark’s team worked across agencies to stop cyclospora from spreading.
The program is still going today, but since 2023, Clark has been director of the Minnesota One Health Antibiotic Stewardship Collaborative at the Minnesota Department of Health, where she works on a team that promotes responsible antibiotic stewardship.
The connections she made during her MPH program “are the reason I have the career I have now,” Clark says.
