Helping Pets, Patients, and Lab Animals: The Career of Christina Winnicker

Through changing roles, the goal has remained – keeping animals safe and healthy

(Christina Winnicker with her dogs Demi and Tassi, courtesy of herself)

Christina Winnicker, DVM, has spent her career helping all kinds of animals in all kinds of ways. In private practice, she loved working on cats, since they are so good at masking their ailments and helping them can be a puzzle. But she spent equal care on the more unusual patients, like a goat in New York City.

“In Manhattan, in the Upper East Side, you don’t expect to find anything remotely farmy walking through the door,” she said.

Luckily for the sick kid, Winnicker was experienced in farm animals. After an undergraduate degree at Penn State, where she gained useful regulatory experience through working in their state diagnostic lab, she attended Mississippi State. She was drawn to their program for the unusual problem-based learning style. In later years Mississippi has integrated more traditional classes into their curriculum, but in her time their program was based entirely on hands-on case study learning, taking cases from pets to farm animals.

“We would be presented with a dog with certain symptoms, and then we had to explore what are those symptoms, what body systems are involved, and we would get lectures related to that case,” she said.

This style fit perfectly with Winnicker’s learning preferences, and gave her a wide range of hands-on experience that most students don’t get until much later.

“For me it was very engaging, very interesting, and it made me a problem solver,” she said.

She followed up her degree with an internship at the Animal Medical Center in New York City, followed by a few years in private practice. However, her heart was set on a residency and a specialization. During her time in private practice, she attended pathology lectures back at the Animal Medical Center, where she connected with lab animal veterinarians from Columbia University. They encouraged her to look into lab animal medicine, and she landed a three-year residency with the University after four years in private practice. 

“Laboratory animal medicine is this fantastically complex mix of regulatory, ethical considerations, clinical care, and pathology. Plus all these crazy different species that you rarely work with even in veterinary school,” she said.

Her varied background working on farm animals, pets, and in the high case load internship in New York prepared her well for this new career chapter that she had not planned for. Her work in the Penn State diagnostic lab had made an impact, and she had planned on specializing in pathology. However, after seeing the cutting-edge research being done at Columbia, her love for lab animals grew.

“Every day that I worked at Columbia, the kind of work that those researchers were doing was just incredible,” she said. “The thought process behind it, the care with which they took to develop their models, the passion behind whatever medical problems that they were trying to solve, it was just mind blowing.”

She stayed for two years after her residency, becoming the Chief of Comparative Clinical Services overseeing large animal surgery. After Columbia, Winnicker moved on to her first stint with Charles River in the Global Animal Welfare division as director of Enrichment and Behavioral Medicine.

The goal of her first team at Charles River was to make lab animals as happy and comfortable as possible. As a team of veterinarians, this work was personal to each employee – every veterinarian starts as a science-minded student who loves animals. Upholding the 3Rs of ethical animal use – Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement – is not just a box to tick for lab animal vets, but a passionate personal mission. 

It isn’t just the animals that benefit from advocates like Winnicker, however. The calmer the animals, the better the science.

“If you're put into a very stressful or foreign environment, you're not at your physiologic baseline,” she said. “And what we really want from research models is for their physiologic baseline to be normal, so that they are excellent scientific models for whatever they are needed for.”

After eight years at Charles River, she got another offer from Columbia: would she like to return to help build a new facility for their neuroscience institute? Would she like to oversee the construction, organization, and management of a brand new, 35,000 square foot vivarium?

“Of course I was interested!” she said. “The diversity of animals and research work by the almost 40 in vivo labs in the neuroscience facility made getting them up and running a brilliant experience.”

After another five years with Columbia, she moved once more into industry with a stretch at GlaxoSmithKline. There she worked in their external diligence program, making sure outside contractors (like Charles River) upheld the highest standards of ethical animal use.

Finally, now back at Charles River as Executive Director Laboratory Animal Medicine, part of her role involves liaising with clients and showing them the standard of care at Charles River. Having seen both sides of that relationship between contractor and client, she is able to effectively communicate with each.

Over the course of her career, Winnicker says that the refinement of animal handling has seen the biggest and most positive changes. As our understanding of laboratory animal needs improves, so does their care and the science they contribute to.

“The handling, the habituation, the environments that we keep them in effects the science,” she said. “It's almost like when you're remodeling a house. You go in and you replace all the electrical and all the plumbing, right? That's really boring. It's all behind the walls. But the effect on the house is dramatic. I feel like enrichment behavioral management is the same thing. It's all behind the walls, but the effect on the outcome of the science is very dramatic.”