Editor’s Note: Dr. Steve Osofsky is the Jay Hyman Professor of Wildlife Health & Health Policy at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health. As one of the pioneers of the One Health movement, Dr. Osofsky is committed to mentoring the next generation of conservation leaders to solve problems at the interface of wildlife health, domestic animal health, and human health and livelihoods. WildLIFE caught up with Dr. Osofsky to reflect on 2024 and to find out what’s in store for 2025. 

2024 was a big year for the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health! What accomplishments are you most proud of in 2024? 

Gosh, yes–2024 was absolutely transformational for the Center! To my pleasant surprise, we’ve been able to stand-up virtually all of our main new programs within the first calendar year of Lisa Yang’s extraordinary $35 million gift. In terms of the highlights, we’ve selected our first class of Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health Postdoctoral Fellows— and they are extraordinary young colleagues clearly poised to play leadership roles in wildlife health. I am not prepared to announce their names just yet, but stay tuned! I will note that we hired our first ever Cornell K. Lisa Yang Fellow in Free-Ranging Wildlife Pathology, and Dr. Carmen Smith has just gotten back from a trip investigating unexpected mortalities in Greater Asian one-horned rhinos in Nepal, while focusing on boosting local capacity in wildlife pathology—hugely exciting, and a position I’d been dreaming about creating for years (now possible, thanks to Lisa Yang!). 

We are also in the process of awarding up to two full PhD fellowships— interviews happen this month. And, applications for the CVM’s new Cornell K. Lisa Yang Residency in Wildlife Population Health were due this past Monday, so whomever is selected will be starting this summer. We’ve also just received our first batch of proposals for our new internal grants program, the Catalyzing Conservation Fund— we will have those reviewed by the end of February, I hope. And I am extremely pleased that we’ve been able to provide 28 grants so far to Cornell DVM students through our Student Support Fund, for experiential learning opportunities not eligible for the Expanding Horizons Program. If you haven’t been reading the student blogs coming out of those projects, you’ve been missing out on some great stuff!

That’s a basic outline of some of the main things coming out of our first year as the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health. I am exhausted just thinking about this whirlwind of a year, and 2025 is already shaping-up to be even busier!

What are you excited about or hopeful for in 2025? 

Hope is at a premium right now. We’ve obviously seen major attempts at global environmental agreements fail to deliver in 2024 (on climate, biodiversity, plastics, and pandemic prevention and preparedness…). That’s all pretty sobering, but we can’t give up— not at that scale, or at smaller ones. I am quite excited about the progress of many of our current programs. My own AHEAD program work in southern Africa (where I’ve been working, gulp, for more than 30 years now) is coming to fruition, in terms of improved livelihoods for livestock farmers and the real possibility of restoring some of Africa’s most important wildlife migrations— a genuine example of real, meaningful change taking a long time! Across our portfolio of programs being led by such an amazing array of faculty, staff, and postdocs (and students!), we are seeing results. I think most of my colleagues would agree that conservation is both a bottom-up as well as top-down endeavor, but in many cases it’s the bottom-up work that lays the foundation and builds the personal relationships critical for long-term success.

Are there any recent conservation success stories you wish more people knew about? 

I try to Tweet cool success stories out here. From 2024, here are a few of my favorites!

• ‘A beautiful thing’: Klamath River salmon are spotted far upstream in Oregon after dam removal 
• And tiger populations are actually growing in key range countries, for example in Nepal and Thailand
• And one of the most endangered carnivores on earth is finally getting more attention!

Are there areas of conservation we should be thinking more about in 2025? 

As I said when we first learned of Lisa’s amazing gift: 

We will utilize the opportunities this incredible gift provides to work on tilting the scales back toward the type of environmental stewardship we ourselves need to survive as a species. Extinction is just a part of the story — the COVID-19 pandemic should have prompted global understanding of the fact that our own health, and that of the global economy, are intimately tied to how we treat the natural world … whether we are talking about saving wildlife, mitigating the global climate crisis, or preventing the next pandemic, we need to redefine our relationships with wild nature and our fellow species…. Our fundamental goal is to help humanity make more holistic, better-informed decisions, in terms of land- and ocean-use planning, public health policy and environmental conservation…. 

Conservation is clearly an ‘all hands on deck’ endeavor. We work with farmers, economists and other social scientists, ecologists, local governments, national governments, multilateral agencies, NGOs, the private sector, and so on — we certainly don’t believe academia has ‘all the answers’ … it is about fostering meaningful partnerships, and recognizing that real ‘change for good’ often takes years.

I also noted that:

When new veterinary students first arrive on campus, I think many of them think that wildlife conservation is about… wildlife. Most of them learn over time that fostering meaningful stewardship of our natural world, given how important that is to, for example, public health and sustainable development goals, depends upon our ability to genuinely communicate with local communities, to listen, and on our ability to think and act with empathy.

Programs like Expanding Horizons and the Student Support Fund are so very important, allowing us to support those students who seek a career in conservation to get out into the real world as part of their training, and in 2025 we are able to support such experiential learning for more students than ever.

In 2025, we need to redouble our efforts. We have exciting examples of progress we can and must build upon— failure is not an option! And, finally, as we move into 2025, we all need to keep in mind that conservation is not walled-off from politics, not by any means. So please remember (at a minimum) to vote, wherever in the world you live now or in the future, if you are so fortunate as to have that right. Conservation policy and politics are closely intertwined around the world, and elections can truly change the world for the better if voters educate themselves about the issues they care deeply about.

Do you have a favorite animal at the moment?

Very hard to choose, but elephants and rhinos are high on my list!