A homegrown success

Dr. Joe Rubin has made a mark with his research focusing on antimicrobial resistance. The CAHF funded most of his PhD research, which focused on establishing a baseline set of data to understand how common resistance is in Staphylococci bacteria in dogs, giving a better understanding of the emergence of resistance.

He has continued to investigate antimicrobial resistance, including a long-term, longitudinal study of antimicrobial resistance in Escherichia coli (E. coli) causing urinary tract infections. CAHF funding has allowed him to collect eight years of data, providing a wealth of information to his research team.

“We can show trends in antimicrobial resistance and really be able to detect anything ‘scary’ that might be emerging,” says Rubin, who became a faculty member in the college’s Department of Veterinary Microbiology in 2012.

Rubin now runs a larger graduate program that is supported by external funding agencies, and he continues to supervise graduate students who work on CAHF-funded projects.

“This fund really allowed me to do research as a graduate student and allowed me to cut my teeth in the area that I’m now doing research on as a faculty member. In a lot of ways that’s a pretty big success story in that it has actually supported research in a graduate student that is now paying dividends in other ways,” says Rubin. “It did provide that seed money and things have grown out massively from there.”