Join us on Wednesday, April 15 for a Penn Climate Seminar featuring Andrew Hoffman, Gilbert S. Kahn Dean of Veterinary Medicine at the School of Veterinary Medicine.
Veterinary medicine aims to protect and preserve animal health, biodiversity, and agriculture-food systems, all areas heavily impacted by climate change. We will discuss the connections between climate change and veterinary medicine while highlighting opportunities to engage across schools through a One Health framework. Finally, we will discuss Penn Climate Insights, a new knowledge-sharing platform originating from Penn Vet that aims to bolster climate education and interdisciplinary collaborations across Penn.
Dr. Andrew Hoffman is a large animal veterinarian who started his career in rural New England private practice. He is the Gilbert S. Kahn Dean of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania since 2018. Prior to his appointment as Dean, he was faculty at Tufts University for 24 years, where he assumed numerous leadership roles: Director of Equine Sports Medicine; Director of the Lung Function Testing Laboratory; Director of the Stem Cell Laboratory; and Director of the Regenerative Medicine Laboratory. His over 20 years of continuous NIH funding focused on therapies for emphysema and asthma, including AeriSealTM for human emphysema currently in U.S. clinical trials, and AeroHippusTM, which is the inhaler for treatment of equine asthma. Hoffman also developed a spectrum of non-invasive diagnostic lung function tests in animals ranging from mice to bottlenose dolphins to elephants.
At the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) he founded the first Extracellular Vesicle core in the U.S. As Dean, Hoffman has focused on interdisciplinary and interprofessional scholarship for the veterinary profession including new dual degrees for VMD students, and founding the Institute of Infectious and Zoonotic Diseases, Center for Stewardship Agriculture and Food Security, and Wildlife Futures Program. He is a member of the National Academy of Practice, and serves on several advisory groups related to climate change, including founding Chair of the Climate Change Task Force of the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges, the National Academy of Medicine Action Collaborative (Education committee), the National Academy of Science Engineering and Medicine Environmental Health working subgroup, the Methane and Health working group of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Advisory Council for Penn Climate among other things. See Hoffman’s climate-focused activities.