Superstar Vet

Dr. Amy Baker (2002)
No way was Amy Baker’s career path going to led to her becoming a veterinarian. Her father, Dr. Butch Baker, was a veterinarian and had a mixed animal practice. Baker recalls her dad’s message to her. “He said, ‘do something else where you don’t have to work so hard,’” Amy Baker said. “I resisted the call to do veterinary medicine as a young adult because of the long hours and the physical demands of the job that I saw my dad and his practice partners put in.” But the pull of the family career was just too much for her. “When I imagined the possibilities of being a veterinarian doing infectious disease research I knew my career path,” Baker said. And what a DVM. Baker is a superstar DVM (2002) as a research veterinary medical officer and lead scientist at the National Animal Disease Center in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Ames.