The Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine earlier this month announced a new Master of Science in Conservation Medicine degree program, which will provide a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to biodiversity.
It will be the first master's program of its kind in the United States, according to Gretchen Kaufman, director of Tufts' Center for Conservation Medicine.
The one-year, non-thesis degree aims to broaden the conventional understanding of health and examine the ways humans, animals and the environment are interconnected.
"The concept is that there is one health, one world," said Joann Lindenmayer, a Cummings associate professor of environmental and population health. "The essential piece of that is that humans and animals live in an environment where they impact each other, and impact the environment."
The new program is expected to be open to students in the fall of either 2010 or 2011, "depending on how quickly things come together," Kaufman said.
Lindenmayer called the new degree program "a very natural addition" to Cummings. She explained that the program, given its location at the veterinary school, will emphasize the study of animal health in particular, but in relation to increasingly prevalent global problems, among them climate change, pandemic infectious disease and pollution as a result of growing world trade.
The degree will blend the traditionally distinct undergraduate and graduate schools at Tufts, enlisting faculty from nearly every corner of the university, including the undergraduate biology department, the School of Engineering, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy in Boston in addition to Cummings.
Until recently, the creation of a master's degree for conservation medicine was more of a nebulous proposal than an imminent reality. A leadership grant received earlier this year from the Regina Bauer Frankenberg Foundation for Animal Welfare in addition to continuous funding from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation prompted Tufts' Board of Trustees to approve the program in April, according to Cummings spokesperson Tom Keppeler.
With the funds, "we're laying the groundwork over the coming year or more and building the curriculum," Keppeler said.
This groundwork, Keppeler added, includes public announcements in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, local papers and veterinary periodicals. Kaufman said Cummings representatives will also be networking at national veterinary conferences.
The degree program will complement Cummings' twelve-year-old Tufts Center for Conservation Medicine. The center, inaugurated in 1997, was the first in the world to focus on this field of study. Tufts also played an integral role in selecting a name for the science, coining the phrase "conservation medicine."
Kaufman said she hopes to accept about 10 students into the program. Students with only bachelor's degrees in science fields will likely not be accepted, she said.
"For the program, we are looking for students who already have some sort of expertise, either a master's or a Ph.D," Kaufman said. She explained that the curriculum is designed for students who have completed higher education in a specific field but lack sufficient knowledge in related disciplines essential to the study of conservation medicine.
The eclectic curriculum for the future Master's students does not have a singular focus, but will teach students to inspect the increasingly interdependent world from a heterogeneous perspective.
With only ten people, most classes will be "very much interactive seminars, working on problems together, and formulating discussions," Kaufman said. "Every student will have his or her own particular focus to follow the whole year of the program and ... be a leader for a team on an individual project."
As well as having an opportunity to spearhead projects of their own design, several students in the degree program will be able to join international missions already started by the Center for Conservation Medicine.
Lindenmayer said the university should be proud of its latest interdisciplinary venture. "Tufts supports this kind of program, and the pieces have been there for a very long time," she said. "Given all the wonderful resources we have at Tufts, it's an environment that has allowed this idea to flourish."
