Strategic Plan 2023-2027

Leading and Inspiring Change for a Healthier World

Introduction

In 2018, the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) embarked on an ambitious strategic plan with goals organized under six broad initiatives:

Educational Innovation and Career Readiness
Business and Entrepreneurship
Transformative Research
Advances in Animal Human and Ecosystem Health
Creating a Diverse, Engaged and Continuously Learning Community
Strengthening our Foundation (Infrastructure, Relationships and Financial Resources)

The plan provided an effective blueprint to guide our priorities and to communicate our goals externally. We maintained momentum on our plan and its implementation by reviewing progress at least three times per year and reporting regularly to the college community and the College Advisory Council. With this momentum, we were able to achieve many of our goals. While all of the accomplishments are too numerous to list here, a few highlights are provided as examples.

In the past six years, the college has:

Created five new endowed faculty positions.
Significantly reduced educational debt for D.V.M. graduates relative to private-practice starting salaries, in part by raising $23M for new scholarships.
Increased internal and external research funding by over 40% to $43 million per year.
Supported researchers by establishing a new bridge funding program and establishing a research development office.
Created the Center for Veterinary Business and Entrepreneurship and hired three dedicated faculty members.
Established a new faculty development program and improved faculty titles.
Increased staffing and support for well-being initiatives.
Created new staffing and programs for diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Established a fully-accredited public health degree program and the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health.
Assisted in the accreditation of partner institution City University of Hong Kong’s Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine program and the graduation of their first veterinary class.
Went nearly paperless in our animal hospitals with improved technology supporting clinical practice and research.
Established the Richard P. Riney Canine Health Center, Duffield Institute for Animal Behavior and K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health.
Initiated a broad reimagining of our approach to the veterinary clinical curriculum.

Our goals were ambitious; some were modified as conditions changed, others are still in progress. And, inevitably, new challenges arose – most significantly, the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the college played a critical role for the university overall. Our testing services and public health leadership were key factors in allowing the Cornell University campus to reopen for in-person instruction in Fall Semester 2020. Ultimately, the Cornell COVID-19 Testing Laboratory tested over two million human samples for SARS-CoV-2, serving Cornell and the surrounding region in partnership with Cayuga Health Systems.

The purpose of our most recent strategic planning effort during 2022 and 2023 was to select initiatives to carry forward from the prior strategic plan and to identify new goals to guide our work in the coming years.

This process involved community open forums and input gathering to create broad topic areas, the creation of steering committees for each identified topic area, and the development of priority plans from each committee. Those sources have been synthesized in the plan you have before you.

For this next strategic plan, our mission remains the same: to improve the health and well-being of animals and people. Yet, conditions have changed significantly. The pandemic underscored the risks of zoonotic diseases and the value of collaborative work across human, animal and environmental health. Climate change and its related impacts have worsened, with 2023 as the hottest year on record. Artificial intelligence captured public attention as machine learning and large language models became more widely available. Demand for veterinary services exceeded all predictions regionally, while the educational landscape changed with several new veterinary schools established in the United States (approximately 14 at this writing). Similarly, demands for a skilled professional public health workforce are also growing, influenced by policy, demographic and economic conditions. Advances in research methodology also brought a new emphasis on basic and applied research across animals and people.

These new events create an ever-shifting environment, rich with challenges and opportunities. The plan in the following pages showcases several broad priorities we will pursue. These represent goals we share as a college, recognizing that individual units and departments have their own initiatives relevant to their work.

Describing new goals often leads to questions about the future of current programs. This document does not showcase every effort at the College of Veterinary Medicine – the full breadth of our work can be found on our website, in our annual reports, our news articles and social media accounts, which better capture the rich diversity of our activities. We have also summarized the breadth of college work in the About the College section.

All our programs are interconnected; our research informs our education, clinical care and public health practice – and vice versa. Thus, the success of each priority impacts the success of the others. With those connections in mind, we will pursue our goals in alignment with our vision and mission and with the aim to build on the many successes in recent years.