Devin von Stade

Just as I didn’t know I wanted to be a veterinarian until I was almost done with college (Pitzer), I also didn’t find out I wanted to go into pathology until near the end of veterinary school (UC Davis). After my first research project, the summer of my freshman year in college, I had told myself “nope” never doing that again; it wasn’t until later that I understood, my dislike stemmed from my own lack of understanding. I have always had a need to understand how things work, and I needed a lot more education before I could understand the awesome things I was taking part of in that lab. Two years later I was co-designing a mathematical model for behavior based on skeletal proportions using birds as an example, and knew then that I wanted interdisciplinary, collaborative research to be a part of my career and to do that I needed to train a specific skill set.