Lorraine J. Hoffman Graduate Alumni Award
David Suarez
PhD ’95 Veterinary Microbiology
Athens, Georgia
Today, Dr. David Suarez is an internationally recognized expert in avian viral diseases.
His career didn’t start in that direction however.
“I decided in middle school that I wanted to be a veterinarian,” Suarez said, “and because my experience with veterinarians was primarily with my local small animal veterinarian, I was focused on small animal practice.”
After graduating from Auburn University with his DVM, Suarez headed in that direction, working for three years in a busy small animal
practice in Alabama. However, veterinary school broadened his perspective about other opportunities and he became interested in doing veterinary research.
Knowing being a small animal practitioner wasn’t a long-term answer to his career ambitions, Suarez started looking into graduate programs. At that small Alabama clinic, Suarez routinely saw cases of feline leukemia virus, which got him interested in retroviruses and virology.
That’s when he came across Iowa State’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
“Iowa State had an opportunity to study another retrovirus, bovine immunodeficiency-like virus in cattle, as a model for human HIV,” Suarez said.
He was a student at Iowa State, but his research was conducted at the USDA National Animal Disease Center in Ames. But another career switch was about to happen.
“Our research didn’t show that BIV was a major pathogen in cattle and as such it was not a good model for HIV,” Suarez said. “The opportunity for future BIV research funding seemed unlikely and impacted my job goals after graduation.”
It was during his job search that Suarez met with the laboratory director at the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL). The rest, as they say, is history.
At the time Suarez had no experience with poultry but the skills he developed while in grad school translated to this field. He found working with chickens had numerous advantages over cattle.
“I was able to do larger numbers of animals in each experiment and highly pathogenic avian influenza caused a rapid and often fatal disease in poultry that allowed us to do multiple studies each year,” he said.
When Suarez started working at SEPRL avian influenza, the United States had not seen an outbreak of the disease for over a decade. That quickly changed.
Suarez’s research changed to concentrate on this new zoonotic pathogen and solidified his transition to avian medicine. It’s a career path he has been on for the last three decades.
In that time, Suarez’s work has impacted the poultry industry tremendously. He has developed rapid molecular diagnostic tests for avian influenza and Newcastle disease virus. This has changed the way these diseases are diagnosed worldwide.
“The ability to get rapid and sensitive test results in just a few hours has fundamentally changed how APHIS and states respond to outbreaks of HPAI and NDV in the United States,” Suarez said. “Depopulation of infected flocks often occurs in 24 hours of testing and this rapid response has greatly decreased farm to farm spread of these viruses which prevents new outbreaks and reduces costs for everyone.”
Suarez has also pioneered work in the development of new vaccines and the proper use of vaccines in the field. His laboratory has provided updated vaccines for HPAI using reverse genetics. This vaccine was the first used to vaccinate California condors to help mitigate HPAI in this endangered species.
Pretty impressive for someone who had no poultry experience.
