for joining us today I'm looking forward to talking with all of you so as Jenny mentioned my name is Megan Mueller and I'm faculty here at the veterinary school um and what I really enjoy about working at the vet school is we have lots of people from lots of different backgrounds so my background is in Psychology so I really focus on studying the psychology of the human animal Bond um but of course one of my favorite parts of my job is teaching in the um map program so that's what we'll talk abo
ut today so um a little bit about the coming School of veterinary medicine we are for those of you who are not familiar with the geography of Massachusetts we are about 45 minutes to an hour west of Boston but very close to Worcester that's sort of our home city um but we have a lot of great collaborations with all of the different schools at tus and I teach on some of the other campuses and so it's really a great environment um and then of course we have the the um small and large animal hospit
als here on campus with us and so um a lot of great stuff going on with that school so today what I'll talk a little bit about is um what is the center for animals and public policy which is the center that houses the map program we'll talk a little bit more about our MS in animals and public policy program which as Jenny mentioned we call the map program and so you know I can answer any questions you might have about the map program and then I'll talk a little bit about my research on human ani
mal action just to kind of give a flavor for the kind of work that we do and if you're interested in other areas I believe um Dr mob Dr rberg and shaa Dinger has also done um webinars on their research interests that have been recorded so um if you're interested in in one of those areas you can listen to the work that they do um and then we'll have some more time at the end for questions you can also feel free to put stuff in the chat as well you know we don't have a huge group here so I'm happy
to answer questions as they come up so this is the center for animals and public policy this is where I am right now and I'm sort of in the back behind this office right here um this is our house on campus it's great it's um got a nice Library conference room area where the students sometimes hang out a kitchen that kind of thing and this is where the core faculty are um in the middle of campus and the mission of the center is um is really to focus on work that underscores the idea that animal
well-being matters and that human and animal well-being are linked and so we can really best improve the lives of people and animals by understanding these relationships and taking a scientific approach to understanding how humans and animals interact in many different settings in our world so the role of the center within the coming School of veterinary medicine our job is to really um educate students about human animal relationships about how public policy can affect animals we have a obvious
ly a degree in public policy we have a strong undercurrent of policy and the different ways that people can value animals and the goal of this is to really promote broad discussion of the meaning and applications of animal health and well-being we really try to give folks the tools to understand how to have conversations about different issues related to humans and animals um in ways that are scientifically based and also understanding policy implications we also lead many of the school's Commun
ity engagement efforts we lead the tough spor people program which is the therapy animal group um here on campus which is affiliated with pet partners for those of you who are maybe familiar with animal assisted interventions but also lots of other ways that we interact with the community around Community medicine access to Affordable veter Ary care um other initiatives like that so the areas of focus within the center primarily fall into three areas so the area that um I work in is human animal
relationships which is a category that encompasses a lot of these psychology based aspects of human animal interactions animal assisted interventions understanding the human animal Bond and the health and mental mental physical health outcomes of having pets also related and there's a lot of interaction between these two groups is the Companion Animal Welfare and behavior section that really focuses on supporting the welfare of companion animals shelter animal shelter policy and practice and ap
plied animal behavior so a lot of map students have a strong interest in Sheltering or working with animals in community and we have a lot of ways to do that in this program um then there's human Wildlife interactions which is primarily led by Dr rberg who directs the center um studying areas of human Wildlife conflict Urban wildlife and how to manage the policy and ethics of how humans interact with wildlife in many ways and then also animal use in terms of practice and policy understanding lab
and farm animal welfare what the regulations are around animals in research and food animal policy so the goals of the map program are really focused around policy so it's one of the things that makes us unique we are an animal policy program and policy really includes all the different ways that communities can act collectively so we really try to prepare students to be able to actually solve challenges to the health and well-being of animals and people by giving you analytical research and co
mmunication skills you really will have a full toolbox of um ways in which you can use research and data to help Advance policy as well as communicate your ideas in a clear way we also expose students to a wide range of animal issues you get everything from companion animals to farm animals to lab animals to Wildlife and really understanding the breadth of animal policy and then also encourage ing students to understand and be able to fairly evaluate multiple viewpoints on a particular issue a l
ot of issues related to animals are contentious and it's important to be able to understand how to have those conversations um in a way that's productive so in terms of the curriculum of the program there um are two tracks within the program and everybody takes the Core Curriculum and in the fall the curriculum is the same for both tracks then you make a decision about which track you want to pursue at the end of the fall semester the majority of students do the externship track or the applied t
rack where they do a summer externship in an organization a nonprofit a government organization um there's lots of different types of externships um or you can do a Capstone research project which would be um for the research track where you do an independent research project that's the summer and The Following fall semester and then there are different electives that you can also take in between there uh Beyond The Core Curriculum so the Core Curriculum starts with the animals and Society cours
e um which runs in both a fall and spring semester so animals in society one in the fall and two in the spring and this is really the core course as it relates to um introdu ction to policy and animal issues in different types of animals as well as the human animal interaction seminar and so this course is comprised of a policy module a companion animal module a wildlife module a lab animal module and a farm module in addition to this human animal interactions seminar so it really gives you a ni
ce breadth of um of content um then in the fall is also research methods which is quantitative and qualitative research skills and we find this is really important even if you're not planning on going on to do research to understand how to be a good consumer of research and to be able to evaluate data in an effective way um and we also have a a statistics course in the fall semester then in the spring there's a public policy analysis course which students have found hugely helpful in developing
those skills around developing and analyzing policies so again in the applied track you take the Core Curriculum plus there is a communicating policy positions course in the spring semester and you'll do a summer externship um and that leaves about five credits or more for completing electives that you might be interested in the research track has the Core Curriculum plus a more advanced statistics course in the spring semester a research methods course in the spring semester that is centered ar
ound developing your own research proposal and then research one and two in the summer and fall as you complete your project um plus there's still time for electives there are many different electives and they kind of vary year-to year but um some of the popular ones are animal law um which is taught by judge Martha Grace who's wonderful and an Alum of the map program um wildlife and captivity Animal Welfare science there are two animal behavior courses one in the fall and one in the spring and
then there's many applied electives where you're actually in the community doing um different types of programming such as the pause for people elective animal shelter visitation Community Cat Clinic lots of different ways to get involved um for those who are interested in what externships might look like this is just kind of a smattering of the different kinds of places that our map students have gone in the last several years um so you can see it really ranges from working at the MSPCA and adv
ocacy to working at a zoo um to USDA so there's lots and lots of different ways um or places we can connect you based on where your interests are some example research projects from from some research track students so again a real range of topics from um attitudes towards seals to community programs and Animal Welfare to feline Dental practices in animal shelters so as you can see you can really customize the research track project um based on your interest and as it aligns with the interest of
Faculty members who can mentor you so where do map graduates go next and this is one of the most interesting questions to ask because I think one of the best things about this program is how many different types of cool things our alumni go on to do and it's not just one career path there's just so many different options um so we have lots of alums who work in animal protection or conservation nonprofits um Regional or National Humane Societies we have a number of students who go on to veterina
ry school Law School or other graduate school such as a PhD um working in the government or working in research compliance so lots of alums all over the place doing many amazing things so for example a couple of our um map alumni Kate Atma who works for Pet Smart Charities um Dena who works for forpaws USA as you can see we've got some other alums here I won't read all of them but um who work in different types of um Wildlife areas or working for the iook so um again lots of different options fo
r careers I think one of the best things about this program is that it is great for students who really would like to have a career in animals working for animals for the protection of animals but are not really sure what that pathway is um this program can be a great way of exposing you to different types of options that are out there in terms of careers so in terms of applying for the map program we have two deadlines every year of this year the deadlines are February 5th and April 1st and the
re's some more information on Graduate Admissions and I'm sure Jenny will um provide you with similar links as well so I'll just stop right here before I launch into talking a little bit about my research to see if anyone has any questions about the program itself the curriculum the application anything like that you can feel free to raise your hand or unmute yourself or put it in the chat hi there thank you for your time um and sharing information about this program um I'm wondering if this can
be completed virtually or if you have to be on campus yeah that's a that's a great question um no our program is in person so all of our classes are in person right now yep that's that's a great question I I know it's um it is challenging a lot of things are online now but um we find that a lot of the benefit of this program is in the networking and connections that you make and we have lots of guest speakers that are folks who are working in these organizations and it's really beneficial to ha
ve that inperson component it's a relatively small cohort of students we usually have between 12 and 18 students um and they've really developed kind kind of a um a team uh atmosphere so it's um it is in person thank you um there's a question around are research projects meant to be developed independently or chosen from a list of sorts yeah that's another good question so um there's a couple of ways you can go about it ideally um you connect with a faculty member who has similar interests and o
ften we have research projects that we can plug you into that we might have a part that you could do as your independent project um sometimes we have um students who come in with an idea that they have or a topic that they have and we can either fit them into something we're doing or it aligns well enough with the faculty member that we can support you we really we try to be very flexible and accommodating to students with their research interest but you have a lot of um support in developing yo
ur idea through the research method seminar um there's a question about if the program is available to International students yes the program is available to International students um what are the common backgrounds of attending students I again one of the things I love about this program is everybody has a different background which is great it like really brings makes the class much more interesting when folks are bringing different types of disciplinary backgrounds so um we you know we have f
olks from Psychology from biology from preet um social work uh we've had folks who are practicing veterinarians who are changing careers former teachers so there's no one standard background that you sort of have to have in order to be in the program there's a question about is there a difference in the two application dates um no uh there is not um we we review applications on both um both dates it it is theoretically possible that the class could fill up on the first date but um typically well
that doesn't always happen so but they're reviewed in the same way thanks these are great questions okay I don't see any others right oh um there's a question about funding opportunities um and the curriculum and course content um so in terms of funding opportunities we do not have any scholarships available at this time if that's what the question is about um there are sort of the standard financial aid opportunities through the university but we don't have any scholarships um yeah the curricu
lum and course content meaning that there aren't any details about what's in the courses um we can certainly if you have any specific questions about what's in the courses we be you could certainly email and we'd be happy to describe a little bit more um about what's in any of the courses or if you have any particular questions about courses one more question about the research track um it looked like based on the assortment of research topics some were more science and actual data based and som
e might be more I mean based in data but more like a thesis and and broader would you say the research track must be based in like heavily in statistics and it's more numberers science-based or is it kind of be informed by science but more theoretical yeah that's a that's a really good question um so typically the research track does involve working with data of some sort but it doesn't have to necessarily be quantitative data we have in fact several students this year who are doing qualitative
projects where they're doing collecting in-depth interview data we've had you know stuff like records review like clinical records reviews um but there has to be a data collection and Analysis component that doesn't mean that it has to all be Advanced statistics there's lots of different types of data that you can use um but there's usually data of some sort now sometimes we have existing data that you could use for a project sometimes you're collecting new data kind of depends on what the proje
ct is and what your interest is great any other questions thank you yeah no problem okay well feel free to keep putting questions into the chat happy to continue to answer them if you think of anything else um so next what I'm going to talk about is a little bit about what I do and again if you want to hear about some of the other faculty we have other webinars um where they talked about what they did so I um helped to teach the research methods one course in the fall semester and also the human
animal interaction module I also help to run the tus Initiative for human animal interaction which is our cross University initiative that um tries to coordinate all different um types of hii work across the campuses and also I help with tough Paws for people which is our therapy animal group on campus something you can get involved with as a student even if you don't have an animal um and then my research focuses primarily on human animal interaction and Adolescent develop I'm a developmental
psychologist and that's the age group that I typically study um in particular my more recent work focuses on pet ownership and animal assisted interventions for teenagers with social anxiety I also focus on human animal interaction and positive Youth Development so how do animals help kids Thrive and then I also work with Dr mob on Research relateded to equity and access to veterinary care and I do Mentor map student research which I enjoy a lot I have a student this year and I'll have two stude
nts next year so what is human animal interaction when I sort of talk about this it's kind of this big term and you could probably use it to describe anything that we do in this program um but the human animal bond is a mutually beneficial or if it's not beneficial it's at least mutually influential and dynamic relationship between people and animals that's influenced by behaviors that are essential to the health and well-being of both so I like this definition because it describes that this is
not a one-way Street it's a two-way interaction and the Animals experience here matters too and so this includes emotional psychological and physical interactions of people animals and the environment so this is a huge umbrella and it covers again as I said almost everything that we talk about in this program human Wildlife interactions companion animals Behavior animals and food production zuntic disease transmission all of these different things are broadly part of human animal interaction now
what I study in particular are the aspects of human animal interaction that are more related to companion animals and the psychology of the bond and so that is typically around companion animals or pets and assistance in therapy animals so the science of human animal interaction is really expanding at an exponential rate this is a graph of the number of citations related to human animal interaction over the last several decades and we're just seeing a huge amount of research in this area which
is really exciting the research is getting a lot better and um there are a lot more people working in this area so there's lots of different areas of research that interact with human animal interaction and many of these are things that our students have been interested in um so animal assisted interventions in healthcare and educational settings are getting are really popular right now and and research in this area um a lot of what I focus on are the mental and physical health benefits or effec
ts of living with pets and how we measure that there are service animals for individuals with disabilities again becoming much more popular the Psy psychology of human Wildlife conflict um and then on the more negative side what's what does it look like to understand the psychology of caregiver burden and grief from pet loss at pet owners um how do human and animal behaviors interact in both positive and negative ways how do we measure stress and Welfare of both pets that live in our home and th
erapy animals and what are cross-cultural differences in human animal interaction recognizing that these relationships don't look the same for everybody in every circumstance and how do we understand and respect those differences so I often think about taking a systems approach to human animal interaction research so we're not just looking at this individual person and the animal um that none of us exist in a vacuum it's not just me and my dog in a bubble that um this relationship can be impacte
d by lots of other things that are going on like the family what's going on in the family I study teenagers so it's a lot about what's going on with their friends and peer group um what's going on in the community and the broader environment and how this all kind of plays out over time so when we're thinking about approaching research on human animal interaction we want to think about which parts of this system can we measure to more fully answer the question that we're hoping to ask so the firs
t research project I'm going to I'm just going to give an example of a couple of different research projects that my lab is working on or has worked on in the last several years um so this one really looks at the system of pets how who has a pet and why and does family and Community um matter and then and also the built environment so for this particular study we were looking at the role of socio demographic variables as impacting the relationship between pet ownership and health and we were int
erested in what what environmental and individual factors would predict pet owners so we know that pet owners are different than non-pet owners we can choose whether or not we get a pet but are how are they systematically different and does that matter does it moderate the relationship between pet ownership and health so for this particular study we used a sample a representative sample of about 1300 um adults in the United States that were part of this larger tus University study on equity in h
ealth outcom and we found that 60% about had at least one pet and we found that um people were more likely to have a pet if they lived in a one family detached residence so that means a standalone house not an apartment building um or a multif family housing and um they were more likely to have a pet if they lived in a more rural housing location where there's more land and they were more likely to have a pet if they lived in the home what was interesting though is there were no differences in p
et ownership based on marital in or household income or marital status so folks across the demograph or the uh income Spectrum own pets but there's something about that feature of where you live that might impact whether or not you have pets anyone who's tried to live in rental housing with a pet knows that it can be expensive there's often pet fees um sometimes pet restrictions you're not allowed to have pets and Rental housing and so a place where there's some built inequities in the system th
at impact whether or not someone can have a pet and if we think that having a pet is beneficial for people we have to figure out how do we reduce those barriers so another example um of a research project where we were looking really more at that um how that individual person animal relationship was impacted by the environment and by the environment I mean covid so um we all have heard about the impacts of pets during covid and so this was something that we wanted to look at particularly for tee
nagers who had a challenging time during covid being separated from friends and from their school and what we wanted to look at was whether having a pet would be linked to using more positive stress coping strategies than more negative Co stress coping strategies so something like going outside and going for a walk that would be a positive stress coping strategy so like um substance use would be a negative coping strategy so what we found was surprisingly um pet owners actually had higher percei
ved stress than non-pet owners which was something that we weren't really expecting and there might be something there about you know whether caring for a pet during covid was stressful you know for a lot of people they said it was difficult if they had Co to for example go to the hospital because um they didn't have have anyone to care for their pet however dog owners were more likely to use healthy coping strategies um than those without dogs however this finding disappeared when we controlled
for demographics showing that for you know for folks who might be already privileged in many ways having a dog was helpful but if you sort of took away all that privilege um that that finding didn't hold up however dog owners were more likely across the board to have a regular walking routine and spend time outdoors and especially again during the early stages of Co um that was probably one of the most adaptive things that you could do during that time and so having a dog was sort of motivation
al and getting outside um so then another study where we were looking at what's going on with the dynamic between pets and teenagers in the family and um involving peers and friends as well and how does that kind of evolve over time so what's that Family Dynamic like so in this study we were looking at how parents might influence the ways in which pets are integrated into the family system you kind of hear you know all the time about how parents might get pets um to help their kids be more um re
sponsible or um to promote good outcomes so how do parents impact how pets are in the family system um and so in in this particular piece we were looking at the family and the child and the animal and in um this particular study we were doing in-depth interviews with parents and what they talked about were a lot of the benefits that you might expect so pets are often great companions they do help our kids learn about responsibility um they are building empathy skills we see some bonding with fam
ily and friends over the pets um what was really intera interesting was they talked about pet related interactions via screens so um did they when they were on Zoom during covid was the pet there um they felt like they had less sedentary screen time if the pet was there kind of helped kids to exercise and get outside and then also some more emotional support things like um regulating emotions when someone's angry or sad however there were also some challenges um pets were a distraction sometimes
um and there were Sometimes some family tension around shared responsibilities there might be jealousy between different family members especially between different kids around you know who's dog the dog is whose favorite um and that the screens did sometimes pull attention away from the pets and again especially during covid um folks found that they were having difficulty traveling because of having a pet and didn't have anybody to watch the pet um and that problematic animal behaviors might a
lso um be a challenge so for example if your dog is really reactive towards other dogs then your teenager might not be able to take that dog out for a walk and of course worrying about sick pets we've all had that experience so you know I think what was interesting here is this shows that there's benefits that exist alongside the challenges and so um we have to think about ways to help support families with pets so that we can minimize the impact of these challenges and then um sort of zooming d
own into what's happening in that moment when you're interacting with an animal U my lab is doing some research um using a technology or a technique called ecological momentary assessment where we are interested in understanding what's happening in the moment when you are interacting with your animal and how we do this is we have an app on a phone um on your phone that hangs you several times a day to see if you're with your dog and how you're feeling and what you're doing when you're interactin
g with your dog and then we also have people where these wristbands that look very much like a Apple watch or a Fitbit that collect physiology data that shows us how stressed or anxious you might be feeling and what this allows us to do is understand in the moment um what's going on with people um when they're interacting with their dogs um and this is a little bit of what it looks like when we sort of ping people and ask them about what they were doing with their dog if anybody else was there h
ow long were they doing it for and this is what we get in terms of the physiology data this is an example of what um electrodermal activity data looks like and electrodermal activity is um a little bit like a sweat response so we measure it off of your palms it's somewhat similar to what you might see in a lie detector test but it's a a good indicator of how anxious you might be feeling and what we can see here is we can layer on this physiology data to what they tell us they're actually doing s
o they say right here for example this participant said I'm interacting with um my friends and you can see this data kind of jumps all over the place right they're maybe having a lot of conversation and they're um they're maybe anxious a little bit and then what we see here is they start interacting with their dog and we see a decrease in that stress response so is it something about interacting with the dog that can help regulate anxiety and um help people come back to a Baseline and then again
we see another period here where they um have the dog come in and you can see it drop down again so this type of methodology allows us to look at what's going on kind of in the moment um with these types of interactions so I mean ultimately a lot of This research what we're doing is trying to get at different parts of the elephant as it were so we had this large scale survey data where we're getting a really Broad View across a lot of people of generally what's going on um when we're interactin
g with pets and then we can sort of Zoom all the way back down into these more individual micro level processes and that's what's so fun about doing science in this area there's lots of different tools that we can use to understand different aspects of the human animal Bond and ultimately our goal is to figure out how can we optimize the human animal bond to create a more Equitable world for example if there are policy related um restrictions on something like access to affordable pet friendly h
ousing that's something that we can change or access to Affordable Veterinary Care or help with um Behavior with a dog's Behavior there are things that we can do to help improve people's lives and their animals lives and so that's really the goal of the science that we're doing here and then how can we use this science to create policies that will make the world a better place for all people and animals and so that's where the research really interacts with policy research is not useful if it ju
st stays you know in that paper in that University we really have to understand how to apply that science in ways that will be um practical okay so that was a really quick over view of just some of the research that my lab does if you're you know interested in um anything about that I mean I'm happy to answer any questions now or you can feel free to email me and um I would be happy to chat with anyone and with that I will um put this up here so these are some of our upcoming events here so we h
ave a virtual open house for the master's program and um this program uh this open house is on on Monday January 8th again it's available on zoom and you kind of it is it is virtual right Jenny Jenny can correct me if that's wrong um you can meet it's all virtual yeah yeah so you can meet The Faculty you can hear a little bit more about the program you can attend part of an animals and Society class with the m the current math students which is kind of fun because you can get to know get sort of
a taste of what the curriculum's like um you can attend the alumni panel and so feel free to join us for that um the distinction between so someone asked about the distinction between hii and Anthology yeah it's a it's an interesting debate about the terminology so anthrozoology and human animal interactions are largely synonymous um human animal interaction started to be used as a term more recently I do think that anthropology covers some other aspects of Less Direct human animal interaction
like the use um of animals in art and um historical narratives around animals so it's I would say it's slightly broader than human animal interaction but they're very related Concepts so the international Society for anthrozoology is our primary scientific organization that covers human animal interaction and everything else yeah great question any other questions that I can answer about the program about research okay well I'll um hang on here for another minute if anybody has anything else but
otherwise um thanks for joining
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