Deans Discuss: A UC Davis Podcast

In this final episode, Deans Brashear and Lairmore explore how medicine intersects with society, from providing care for our homeless community members to protecting our food supply. Dean Brashear catches Dean Lairmore off-guard with a special surprise.

Deans Brashear and Lairmore discuss how the pandemic has changed educational delivery forever and how medical education has become more than just health care training. It’s about creating pathways to build future generations of diverse health leaders.

Deans Discuss: Uniting Human and Veterinary Medicine

In this special four-part podcast series, UC Davis Deans Allison Brashear and Michael Lairmore look beyond the pandemic and explore the impact and intersections of human and veterinary medicine. They delve into research, clinical trials, education, diversity, public service, and more. In the final episode, Dean Lairmore gets a surprise from Dean Brashear.

Episode 1: Research Breakthroughs in Veterinary Medicine

Though the “19" refers to the year the novel coronavirus was actually discovered, we’ll all remember 2020 as the year COVID-19 utterly changed the world. In this final episode of the season, the deans discuss not only the technological leaps made but also the campus-wide collaborations — especially between the School of Veterinary Medicine and School of Medicine that — that gave us all hope and taught us many lessons along the way.

It has been long observed that, after disease ravages a group of animals, the remaining herd often comes to possess a collective immunity. That's one reason some epidemics seem to appear and flame out just as suddenly. But is that a good strategy for a human population fighting COVID-19, as some public figures have wishfully suggested? In this episode, the deans discuss why that is a very bad idea, and how we’ll be better off getting through this winter with clear, constant communication from respected public health institutions.

In politics, it’s often been said that a crisis should never go to waste. In our current fix, we’re finding that the mark of a true leader is someone who takes bold action and develops innovations that bring not just short-term relief but long-term benefit. In this episode, the deans discuss ways that front-line workers are taking initiative and becoming the true heroes of this pandemic.

Did you know that 60 to 70 percent of emerging human diseases come from animal sources? You don’t have to eat the animal to become infected. You just have to share its environment, and habitat destruction is causing our respective territories to increasingly overlap. Join the deans as they discuss how current field studies and advanced modeling technology are helping us trace the progression of novel diseases and predict where the next problem might arise.

The pandemic has us physically distancing ourselves from one another, and this presents a host of challenges to the way humans connect, the way leaders lead, and the ways can take care of our own mind and body amid the chaos. In Episode 15, the deans discuss what it means to “lead in” and consider what adaptations we might want to perpetuate even after the crisis has ended.

One way medical science progresses is through the work done in clinical trials, but they cannot proceed without volunteers. Today, the deans discuss the value of clinical trials and who in the community might consider participating in one. Recently 3,500 people signed up for a UC Davis COVID-19 vaccine trial, but there are many ways to get involved, from answering questionnaires to donating organs after you pass away. There are even clinical trials for pets!

See all the available UC Davis Health clinical studies by visiting studypages.com/ucdavis. And for animal clinical trials visit