Department of Rural Resilience and Innovation

About

Mark is a research scientist and veterinarian who has spent the better part of forty years studying the genesis, detection, epidemiology, prevention, and control of infectious diseases. Before his research and medical careers, he worked as a farrier, farmer, photographer, goat keeper, and construction worker, among other things. His primary research areas included transmissible encephalopathies (scrapie, transmissible mink encephalopathy [TME], chronic wasting disease [CWD or deer dementia], and bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE or mad cow disease]) and diseases caused by herpes viruses and lentiviruses. He worked for several years with international organizations (IAEA, FAO) in developing countries on the epidemiology and control programs for diseases such as foot and mouth, African swine, rinderpest, and contagious bovine pleuropneumonia. He also worked in the regulatory science field as the Director of Human Food Safety for the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine. Prior to “retirement”, Mark worked for ten years as the National Program Leader for Animal Agrosecurity at the USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture, focused on building, funding, and managing the National Animal Health Laboratory Network (NAHLN), providing funding and organizational support to the Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN), and providing funding and administration for research on animal disease issues at Land Grant Universities. Mark began work with Appalachian State University in 2018, and currently is a Lecturer in Biology and Veterinary Technology for courses such as General Biology, Microbiology, Bacterial Pathogenesis, Microbial Diversity, Regulatory Science in Biology and Biomedical Research, Infectious Diseases and Public Health, History of Pandemics, Human Physiology, and Animal Physiology. His full CV can be found here.

Education

DVM, 1994, College of Veterinary Medicine
Washington State University, Pullman, WA

PhD Biological Structure, 1984, School of Medicine
University of Washington, Seattle, WA

BS Cum Laude, Biology/Genetics, 1977
Washington State University, Pullman, WA