Board of Directors
Claire Fellman, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (SAIM), DACVCP – President
Claire Fellman is an associate professor in the small animal internal medicine service at Tufts University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biological engineering prior to her veterinary training at Mississippi State University. She then completed residencies in small animal internal medicine and clinical pharmacology also at Mississippi State University, while doing a PhD investigating the effects of cyclosporine on immune function in dogs. Following her residencies, Claire began her work at Tufts where she leads a One Health collaboration with physicians and pharmacists from Tufts Medical Center with the goal to bring successful antimicrobial stewardship strategies from human medicine to companion animal veterinary settings. Claire’s clinical interests include infectious and immune-mediated diseases.
Krystle Reagan, PhD, DVM, DACVIM – Past President
Krystle Reagan is an associate professor of small animal internal medicine and Co-Director of the Veterinary Center for Clinical Trials at the University of California, Davis. She obtained her veterinary degree and PhD in microbiology at Colorado State University. Upon graduating, she completed a one year small animal rotating internship at VCA West Los Angeles Animal Hospital followed by a small animal internal medicine residency at UC Davis and became board certified in the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine. She then completed a fellowship in companion animal infectious diseases also at UC Davis. Her areas of research include the development of novel infectious disease diagnostics and therapeutics and the use of artificial intelligence/machine learning in clinical decision making, and she is a founding member of the Artificial Intelligence in Veterinary Medicine Interest Group.
Samantha Evans, DVM, PhD, – President Elect
Dr. Samantha Evans is dual board-certified in veterinary microbiology and clinical pathology, with a PhD in virology. She is a native of Boulder, Colorado, and attended Colorado State University for her BS in chemistry, followed by a combined DVM/PhD program at the University of California, Davis. Next, Dr. Evans completed a medicine and surgery internship at Michigan State University and then circled back to CSU for a residency in clinical pathology. She was faculty at the Ohio State University for four years and is currently an assistant professor at Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Evans has been a member of ISCAID since 2010 and her primary research interest is studying feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) from both a diagnostic and therapeutic perspective.
M. Casey Gaunt, DVM, DACVIM – Secretary
Casey Gaunt graduated from the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine in 2006 before moving on to a rotating small animal internship at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM). He completed a residency in Small Animal Internal Medicine at the WCVM in 2010. After a year in private practice in Florida, he returned to the WCVM, teaching Critical Care medicine and later Small Animal Internal Medicine until 2016. Since then, he has been doing full time locum work at private practices and universities in Canada, the US and Australia. He lives in Saskatchewan Canada, where infectious diseases are often thought to be absent or rare, which has played a big role in his interest in the area.
Jane Sykes, BVSc, MBA, MPH, DACVIM – Treasurer
Jane Sykes is a Professor at the University of California-Davis School of Veterinary Medicine with a special interest in small animal infectious diseases. She obtained her DVM degree and a PhD in veterinary microbiology at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and completed a residency in small animal internal medicine at the University of Minnesota and is a board certified small animal internal medicine specialist. She joined the faculty at UC Davis in 2002, and obtained an MBA from the University of Georgia (2020) and an MPH from Kansas State University (2023) with an emphasis on infectious diseases and zoonoses. She founded the International Society for Companion Animal Infectious Diseases (ISCAID) in 2006, has coauthored over 130 peer-reviewed publications, and is the editor of the textbooks Canine and Feline Infectious Diseases and Greene’s Infectious Diseases of the Dog and Cat (5th ed). Her research interests are focused on infectious diseases of dogs and cats with public health significance.
Karolina Scahill, DVM, MSc – Member at-large
Karolina Scahill works with antimicrobial stewardship, quality improvement, education and research, as well as a clinician, in private practice (IVC Evidensia). She has an MSc in infectious diseases and international animal health and is currently undertaking a part-time PhD in infectious diseases that focuses on antimicrobial stewardship and guideline methodology at the University of Edinburgh. Karolina is a member of ISCAID’s guideline committee and is involved as a core group member in the update of the ISCAID urinary tract guidelines and as the methodological chair of the upcoming FIP guidelines. She is also actively engaged in collaborating organisations as the vice-lead of ENOVAT’s guideline working group and as co-lead of GRADE for veterinary medicine.
Gary Whitaker, PhD – Member at-large
Gary Whittaker studied Microbiology and Biochemistry at the University of Leeds (UK). He was awarded a PhD degree in 1991, with a focus on the glycoproteins of herpesviruses. He then did post-doctoral studies on influenza virus at Yale Medical School before moving to Cornell in 1996, where his research is focused on coronaviruses of humans and animals. He is a currently a Professor in the Departments of Microbiology & Immunology and Public & Ecosystem Health.