Kali Holder - Veterinary Pathologist at Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute

Kali Holder, a Veterinary Pathologist at Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, sits down with Ryan to walk through her career in veterinary pathology, and her pathway to this career.

Connect with Kali on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kali-holder-42b8ab101/

See a Gila Monster here: https://cdn.britannica.com/09/187909-050-3F0DC4A2/Gila-monster.jpg

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to the Good Fit Careers podcast where we explore perspectives on work that fits.
I'm Ryan Dickerson, your host.
Today's guest is Dr. Kali Holder.
Kali is a veterinary anatomic pathologist with the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation
Biology Institute.

(00:21):
Kali conducts autopsies on animals that have passed away at the National Zoo in Washington,
DC to find ways to improve the care of the animals in the zoo and in the wild.
After completing a bachelor's degree in biology, a doctor of veterinary medicine program, an
anatomic pathology residency, a postdoctoral program with the San Diego Zoo, and a Global

(00:43):
Health Fellowship of the Smithsonian Institution.
Kali
joins the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
Kali
, thank you for being here.
Oh, it's a delight.
I'm so glad to be here, Ryan.
So to get us started and to teach us a little bit about who you are today, would you walk
us through the work that you do?

(01:03):
So I am an anatomic pathologist at a conservation institution, as you have mentioned, and I
do biopsies and post-mortem examinations on everything that dies at this zoo and our
Conservation Biology Institute that has a breeding facility that is not open to the

(01:25):
public, so we have other animals.
And then we also cover pathology of wildlife that dies on our property as well, because
the National Zoo is located in Rock Creek Park, so it's a huge area of lots of peridomestic
and local wildlife.
So I do biopsies.
I like to say that I do pieces of live things and whole dead things, but no whole

(01:49):
live things.
I'm a veterinarian who works exclusively on biopsies and necropsies.
I look not only at what they look like grossly, so that's with my naked eye, but also histopathologically.
So under a microscope, getting slides of tissues and looking at that.
I also do a little bit dabble in what we would call clinical pathology, so that's when we

(02:10):
take fluids or impressions of tissues, those fresh tissues, and then we stain them immediately,
and I can look at them really quickly.
It takes a long time to make a histopathology slide.
You have to embed it in paraffin and all of that, slice it and put it on a slide.
Whereas an impression smear or something like that, that's going to be a lot faster, so

(02:31):
I can give some answers quicker.
That's awesome.
And we'll get much deeper into that topic in just a minute, but to help us build our
frame of reference and to get a more clear understanding of how you became Dr. Kali
Holder, would you bring us back to the beginning and tell us a little bit about what you were
like as a kid?
I was a weird kid.
I was very curious, very high energy, very climb the tree, roll over the rock, look under

(02:56):
the log, catch the crayfish, where's the snakes, what are these bugs?
So I was very much out and about kind of kid, and I loved learning about everything.
What are these ants doing?
What are these worms doing?
And I kind of feel like that sort of started me on this path of permanent curiosity, this

(03:16):
just being just completely engaged with wanting to know more about stuff.
I did, from a very young age, really find myself connected with animals and really wanted
to do veterinary medicine.
I think that's true for a lot of people that do end up being vets.
I also think it's true for a lot of people that don't end up being vets, and that's
okay too.

(03:37):
Maybe your six-year-old self is not the person who should tell you what to do with your life,
but my six-year-old self was like, yeah, vet stuff, because it was the only way I could
think of to really have a problem-solving, helping animals job.
There are lots of jobs in that career field that are not just veterinarians, but I headed

(03:58):
on this path, and as I learned more, I found that the problem-solving aspect and the diagnostic
side of things was what really got into my soul and made me very happy.
I did some wildlife rehab work, and I happened to be at a wildlife rehabber where if things
died, we would do a postmortem examination.

(04:20):
I'm obviously amateur, but we would at least look to see where we're finding parasites,
where we're finding broken bones, where we're finding tumors.
Those were the first necropsies that I ever did, or a postmortem examination on animals.
Those were the first necropsies that I ever did were in college, in wildlife, and that

(04:40):
was like, wow, this is the coolest thing.
I can try and figure out what's going on, post-m-what, and it was like murder mysteries.
It was so great.
So then I got into vet school.
I did not know this was an actual specialty you could have until I met a veterinary pathologist,
and that particular veterinary pathologist happened to be a pathologist at a zoo, and

(05:03):
I was like, what?
Also, do zoo wildlife and do murder mysteries.
This is it.
This is what I want to do.
So that was my first semester of vet school, and just having my mind blown by that.
So when I went through vet school, I took as broad a specialty track as one can.

(05:24):
So I tracked mixed animal, and I took all of the extra parasitology courses that I could,
and all of the extra rotations in wildlife, and all of the extra rotations in pathology
that I could get my hands on basically, to just make sure that I had a really good grounding
for when I went into my residency.
Residency is in anatomic pathology.

(05:45):
It is three years after vet school.
So you do your vet school.
That's four years.
You do anatomic pathology residency.
That's three years.
You are then eligible to take the exam.
It's broken up a little bit differently now.
You can take part of the exam earlier in your residency, and then you finish your exam process
at the end of your residency.

(06:05):
And then hopefully, good luck to everyone doing this.
You're board certified as a veterinary pathologist.
And then in my case, I wanted to do the weirdest weird stuff I could.
And there was an opportunity at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research that
wanted to do wanted a pathology person who was also familiar with some of the diagnostics,

(06:31):
and like molecular diagnostics, so like PCR and that sort of thing, for some of the diseases
that desert tortoises get.
And I happen to have done some work in a lab on gopher tortoise, respiratory disease.
Gopher tortoises and desert tortoises are both gopheris genus.
So it was very easy translation.
And I had just finished a pathology residency.

(06:53):
So it was solid on my path stuff.
And I went and I did nothing but tortoises for two years.
And it was great.
That team was amazing.
So I loved that, did only herps for two years.
That was great.
And then as I continued to do pathology, I just, I really wanted to do more that had

(07:14):
to do with global health, world health, conservation, that sort of thing.
And I ended up in the program here at Smithsonian in the Smithsonian Global Health Program, which
was located at the zoo physically, part of the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation
Biology Institute.
And so I did what we would call a fellowship.

(07:34):
So I did that.
And then moved over.
I was like, you know, I love global health.
It's so great.
It's so important, but I'm not doing enough pathology and went back to doing more pathology
in the pathology department here at the zoo.
So that's how I ended up here.
It's a little bit of a curving path.
There are residencies that are specifically for anatomic pathology of zoo species, where

(07:58):
they do two years regular anatomic pathology and they do their third year at the zoo.
I did not have one of those.
You don't have to have one of those.
It's really great if you can.
They're super, super competitive and I did not get in.
I was also going into my residency in 2009, which was during a big recession and some
of those programs were cut.
So there were fewer slots.

(08:20):
And also competition for those is always really strong and I didn't get in, but I still
made it to where I am today.
So don't let little things like not getting into the best coolest program stop you.
You can still get there.
That's amazing.
And what a fascinating journey to it.
I can't imagine how competitive that narrow specialty is.

(08:41):
I imagine there are only a handful of positions that can be filled.
I imagine there are a bunch of wonderful people who are so pumped about that path.
Oh, yeah.
It depends on how wide you cast your net in terms of zoos that have their own pathologists
on site.
There's probably like a dozen of us.
Oh, wow.

(09:01):
Maybe 20.
It's getting a little more popular.
On the planet.
Yeah.
Well, in this country for sure.
And then internationally, I'm a little less confident.
But yeah, it's a small crew of people who are working at actual institutions.
Now, there are also reference laboratories that do exotics as well.
And there are people like Mike Garner at Northwest Sioux Path who does just zoological

(09:25):
pathology and has been doing it for decades and is amazing.
So a lot of zoos will send their stuff to him and to other programs like that.
But yeah, in terms of having pathologists on site at the zoo, we are very fortunate to
have an actual pathology department here.
How amazing.
So in terms of landing your first proper full time job after all of that training, what

(09:49):
was that experience like?
What was the interview process like?
How did you actually get the job?
So it was a little bit that I'd been doing the job and they let me do it for real.
I had been a fellow in global health and then I moved over to be a fellow in pathology because
I wanted to do more pathology.

(10:11):
And I had talked to the head pathologist at the time and I was like, "Hey, I know this
path...
This is more for people who are at the end of their residency and not people who have
been out for a couple of years.
But would I be eligible?
Would you mind if I applied?"
He was like, "Oh my God, you'd be the best most qualified person, please apply."
So I applied and I don't even know if you interviewed me because he already knew he probably

(10:37):
did but because I'd already talked to him so many times it didn't register.
So I'm sure he interviewed me but I was very qualified.
So he put me in the fellow position and the week two weeks after I got there he resigned.
So it was me and this other pathologist who'd been there for six months and we looked at
each other and we're like, "Okay, so we're now the department."

(10:59):
And I was like, "We got this."
And props to Andrew Cardicetti who was the other pathologist at the time.
He went with it.
I was like, "We can do this."
And I was like, "We can do this."
And he was very much the organized person, very on top of all of the things.
And I was very much the damage control, let's drill down to what we actually need to do

(11:20):
and also the, "We can do this, buddy.
I believe in us.
Cheerleader."
And we made it through.
We were a great team.
We narrowed our scope to what was really important to the clinicians and the curators.
And we got everything running smoothly.
We ended up putting out tons of reports in a timely fashion which had been a concern

(11:45):
prior to us kind of taking over.
And we ran it so well that they were like, "Okay, would you want to stay?"
Basically.
So the next time an opening was made, and they actually pulled some strings to try and make
an opening happen and get the funding together to actually have a position to open.

(12:07):
They opened that position and I applied for it.
There were other qualified people in there.
So I did have to out compete some people who were solid people.
That was an interview process.
There were people who were veterinarians and not pathologists on my committee because those
are basically our clients as well as our colleagues.

(12:30):
I'm trying to give them information to do the best job in the veterinary side of things.
I'm trying to give them diagnoses to work from.
I'm trying to give them information about the epidemiological situation.
"Hey, I've seen this five or six times.
We should probably be upping our awareness of it."
Or, "Hey, this is new.

(12:51):
Keep an eye out and if we see it more," that kind of thing.
So my interview process involved a lot of clinical veterinarians who are doing clinical
veterinary work actually treating animals as opposed to the pieces of live things and
whole dead things.
That's me.
Were they drilling you on technical questions or did you end your assessments or how did

(13:12):
they evaluate you?
It was more like, what is your approach to things?
What are your priorities?
I don't want to say they're unqualified to ask me technical questions, but the technical
questions that the whole point of hiring me is that I'm a technical expert in my field
that you're going to be able to use.
So they want to know, can you communicate your technical expertise?

(13:34):
What is your turnaround time for communicating that technical expertise?
How are you in conversations about breaking down a complicated case?
What can you add?
That sort of thing is more what a veterinarian is generally into.
And then just like, "Hey, how are you to have around the office?"

(13:56):
All of the same normal interview questions of like, "What is a challenging interpersonal
situation that you have faced and how did you solve it?"
That happens.
Those are normal interview questions.
Everybody has them.
It also seems from this perspective that going through all that training and getting your
doctorate and then doing a residency and then a fellowship and then more and more and more

(14:18):
training that your qualifications are probably indisputable at that point.
You would hope.
You hope.
I mean, they've also, I had the advantage of they'd had over a year of seeing my quality
of work, right?
So they'd seen what I put out.
They had indisputable evidence of what I was capable of because I was doing it.

(14:41):
And that was a little bit of an unfair advantage, but I was getting paid like half of what I
would have been paid if I'd been a real veterinary pathologist here.
So it worked out.
It was a high cost interview right there.
Yeah.
I got there.
I got there eventually.
Yeah.
So in the transition from academia and training into a professional full time role, would you

(15:03):
share with us a little bit about what you learned about yourself in that transition and
as you've been a proper employee?
So this is the longest I've ever been in one position, one office, one city, one state
in a row.
So I grew up, I moved around a whole lot.
And then when you're doing all of these training programs, you're moving for every training

(15:26):
program a lot of the times.
So it was a shift for me to set down roots and actually dig in.
And I did get a little bit itchy around year five.
And I was like, am I, is this a normal thing to do to just keep being where I am?
And I had to think about that.

(15:47):
And the answer is, yeah, I actually really like what I do.
It helps that I have a lot of variety in my cases.
I have a lot of variety.
There's always a new challenge.
There's always a new thing to discuss.
And I never get there is nothing boring about my job.
I could work here for another 20 years and never be bored with what I see on the daily

(16:10):
because it's always something interesting and new.
And that that's important to me.
I am somebody who who craves both input and novelty.
And also I really like being able to contribute.
So being able to approach these novel challenges with expertise is something that I find really

(16:30):
rewarding and being able to add that expertise to something that I really believe in, which
is conservation, right?
Conservation is something that I am super passionate about.
And we are we're doing it.
And I'm helping.
So I love that.
I think it would be harder for me to work in a position where I didn't really believe

(16:52):
in what I was doing and the novelty was not present.
So it is always tempting because there are definitely higher paid jobs that are much
more boring in veterinary pathology.
Like if you have a veterinary anatomic pathology training, you can generally transition to
like a contract research organization and you're doing a lot of reading probably three

(17:15):
or four species and you get really used to that.
And a lot of those are very, very minor lesions or no lesions at all for a lot of the cases.
Whereas I see things like, oh, hey, you have parasites in your brain because you're an
animal that lives outside and that can happen.
So parasites in the brain.

(17:38):
Very interesting.
Terrific.
Whereas you are a lab animal and you are very similar to every other lab animal in your
cohort.
Not to knock the people who do that.
I'm sure it's soothing some days to just be able to crank through stuff.
I can't crank through anything.
I have to do a deep lit dive on tons of cases all the time because this particular thing

(18:04):
in this particular species is I need more information.
Give me more.
Yeah, I love that.
That makes a ton of sense.
In your training and as you were becoming an expert in your field was, I mean, it sounds
like you showed up with all the enthusiasm, all the intrinsic motivation, a wealth of
intellectual horsepower.

(18:25):
What was difficult for you to master in your field?
Well, time management is always a bet noir when you're doing high volume information.
Figuring out when to shift from doing the thing that's really rewarding gives you lots
of dopamine.
So looking at slides, fascinating.

(18:46):
I can lose hours.
I would need to not lose hours looking at slides.
I need to write down what I see and move on.
Yeah, it's really cool.
I got to keep going.
So that's a thing that I had to learn.
Another thing was boundaries for self-care.
I am the kind of person who can just drill down and be looking at my slides for longer

(19:12):
than I should.
And it really helped when I had a dog because I had to go home and walk the dog and it would
make me leave work.
Now I have a spouse and sometimes I need to walk the spouse because they get antsy if
they don't get outside and they can do that on their own, but it's better when it's with
you.
It's more fun together.
So making sure that I make time to leave is a thing that I had to learn in my training.

(19:40):
I also, I read a wonderful book that I wish I'd read earlier in my career called How
We Learn by Benedict Kerry.
And I read that late in my residency or in one of my fellowships.
And I wish I'd read it sooner because it had a lot of really evidence-based practical

(20:00):
recommendations for how to study and how to learn and how to make information more available
to you from your learning.
So that was important.
Yeah, I believe that loud and clear.
In terms of the current role and where you fit within this massive organization, can

(20:22):
you help us understand where you exactly fit?
Where am I?
So yeah.
The Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute has two campuses, one of
which is the zoo proper, National Zoo, right?
It's in Rock Creek Park.
It has all of the exhibits.
It has all of the animal houses.
It also has a hospital.

(20:44):
There is a second facility in Front Royal Virginia that also has a hospital.
There are veterinarians that work at each.
There's quarantine.
There's definitely quarantine here.
I think they have some level of quarantine facilities out there as well.
But all of the necropsies are done here and all of the biopsies are done here and the
pathologists are here in the lower level of the hospital.

(21:09):
So anything that dies on campus here, it just goes up the hill to us.
We're in a not publicly accessible area of the zoo's property in Rock Creek Park.
And then anything that dies in Front Royal also gets sent here and we will do anything
that we need to do either to a carcass or to a biopsy here.

(21:32):
And then that will get sent off to a processing histopathology lab to make slides out of.
So I am in the veterinary hospital.
And we talk about our cases all the time.
We have lots of flow of information.

(21:54):
And that's all in this hospital.
There are other laboratories in this hospital as well.
And I interact with some of the teams for them.
I haven't done a ton with our researchers, but there's also a genetics team and a science
team that does lots of research in the next building over.
So we're on the kind of backstage science side of the conservation organization.

(22:21):
Ideally, the guests never have to think about all the diagnostics that go on behind the
stage unless they want to.
But we're doing it.
We're doing it all day, every day.
This is what we do.
And we love it.
And in terms of your direct team, the people that you'd interact with day to day within
this lower level of the hospital system, what does that look like?

(22:42):
So I am one of two associate pathologists.
We report to a supervisory pathologist.
So there are three anatomic pathologists that are all taking cases.
I'm only one third of the pathologists here.
And then we actually currently have an epidemiological pathology position that is another boarded
pathologist.

(23:03):
So there are actually four anatomic pathologists in the building, although one of them focuses
on epidemiology.
And then we have a pathology technician who is fantastic and does all of the technical
cleaning of necropsy.
She also is really good at samples and that sort of thing.
She's good at pro-secting.

(23:24):
She's been working in zoological institutions for years and years and years and years.
And it is really rare to have that kind of expertise in our technicians.
So we're very pleased with that.
And then we work next door to the clinical pathology lab that does a lot of handling
of samples that need to have like blood work done.

(23:46):
Or if we send out cultures on any of our cases, that's going to go through our diagnostic
clinical pathology lab.
So that's my local team.
And then again, I'm part of the larger wildlife health sciences area and interact with the
clinical veterinarians, Aton.
How interesting.
Tremendous.

(24:06):
Thank you for sharing.
In terms of the tools, the hardware, the toys, the diagnostic systems, whatever it is,
can you regale us a little bit on your toys that you get to play with here?
Oh yeah.
I got so many cool tools.
So I have everything from tiny little scissors and scalpels all the way up to very large

(24:26):
knives and saws and I mean bone saws and saws, reciprocating things.
If I need to get into an Aldabra tortoise, that takes some power tools.
We also have a band saw.
So if we need to split anything or cut through any large carcasses, we've got those tools.

(24:48):
We've got a giant hoist that you know, you got a literal ton of animal.
I don't want to lift that.
I mean, I'll lift, but not that.
So that helps.
We've also got a hydraulic table that goes up and down that helps us set the level.
I used to be I'm five nine and I used to be the shortest pathologist.
So we had another pathologist who was like six feet tall.
And we had another pathologist is like six, three or six four.

(25:11):
And so, and our technician is shorter than I am.
She's normal.
So I was like five or something, normal human.
So there's lots of different heights.
And when you're working in a carcass for hours and hours, I mean, a big, a big animal
could take seven to nine hours to take apart.
And you're on your feet that whole time.

(25:32):
So just ergonomically, the level of the table makes a big difference.
So having that, that adjustable table is really great.
So that's for gross stuff.
We have down draft tables, if we're doing something that is small and stinky, or if we
are working with formal and trimming things that have been formal and embedded, we want
to have something that's going to suck away those fumes.

(25:52):
So you don't have to smell it, which is great.
So that's, that's a cool thing.
I never even thought about that.
Have you a safety cabinet?
A table that pulls the smell away from you.
Yeah, it has it has a draft system that sucks the, the, the air down, which is great because
we have fish in our collection.
And let me tell you.
Some of them get, get very, honestly, I think the frogs might even be worse.

(26:13):
Wow.
Or frogs, the stinky, it's animals you deal with?
Oh, frogs, frog rotting frogs get released.
I'm not going to lie.
And then we've got a giant walk in cooler.
So anything before or after we handle it gets put in that walk in cooler to keep it, keep
it from, from decomposing more.

(26:35):
And we have a biosafety cabinet.
So if we're working with something where we're, you know, is this, are we having an AI concern?
And this is a wild bird.
So we want to do that wild bird in a biosafety cabinet.
So I can, I can do that in a, in a biosafety cabinet.
So that's like a hood.
And when you say you're referring to avian influenza, not an artificial intelligence problem.

(26:57):
No, sorry.
I apologize.
If I am concerned for avian influenza on a case, or if I'm concerned for tuberculosis
or, you know, say I'm doing a primate, those are all things where I'm likely, if it's a
small enough primate, to do it in the hood, because that's going to reduce the amount
of infectious material that is coming off of that animal.

(27:19):
I also have other PPE, obviously, like I have goggles and masks and things like that.
And that's just for our growth.
So that's just for taking it apart.
And then in my office, when I, I may have either digital slides, so I'm reading them on my
computer and I have multiple big screens, or I'm reading them on glass on a slide on

(27:44):
a microscope in my office.
And I have a camera attached to that microscope so that if I need to take pictures to share
with anyone or to document anything, I can take pictures of those slides.
So lots of different levels of everything from band saws and sawsalls up to like, oh, these

(28:04):
are microscope slides and microscope.
Yeah, how fascinating.
What is in terms of the job itself and your normal work, what does a good year look like
for you?
A good year looks like very few mass mortality events.

(28:24):
So when, for example, we have some things where we have like fish, right?
They're in tanks.
If something goes wrong with a pump or something like that, you can have a mass mortality event.
And that is a bad day for everyone.
I like it when those are rare.
There haven't been a lot, but they do kind of ruin your day.
I like sharing cases with people.

(28:46):
So the opportunity to present cases either at rounds or with training programs or in conferences
and things like that, those are really wonderful things to have in my year.
I'm getting the opportunity to go lecture to a vet school in the Caribbean next month,

(29:08):
which is going to be really lovely.
I started lecturing to lots of different vet schools during the pandemic because we couldn't
have students here.
And I was like, hey, I'm sorry we can't have students here right now, but if you have a
pathology club or a zoo wildlife club, I'm happy to talk to them and would lecture to

(29:29):
student groups.
And one of those student groups was Ross University down in St. Kitts.
And their clubs were like, okay, now that people can be in person, do you want to come
lecture in person and do a lecture series?
And I said, well, I will have to talk to my team about that.

(29:50):
And I was able to work it out where I wasn't skimping on my pathology duty, but was able
to go down there.
And I'll get to that again this year.
So I'm really looking forward to that.
So that's a good year for me.
I love being able to help people in range countries.
So if we ever have the opportunity to train or work with places where they're doing on-site

(30:13):
conservation for local species, I love being able to do that.
We've been able to talk to veterinarians in India.
We've been able to work a little bit with some veterinarians working on conservation
in Paraguay.
And so I love being able to do anything that helps people in range countries actually preserve
their wildlife that is their own cultural heritage.

(30:36):
So that's really important to me.
And in terms of collaborating with the other professionals at the zoo, what does that look
like?
It's pretty great.
We're very accessible.
One of the policies that we have is that if you are a zoo employee and you are interested
in a case, you can come and actually see the necropsy.

(30:58):
So keepers for their animals or students that are part of our veterinary program, they'll
get to see necropsies and actually ask questions during the necropsies.
Also researchers, we frequently have researchers that are interested in specific samples and
we'll grab those.

(31:18):
One of my colleagues is working on a frog project right now that is looking at one of
the most important conservation issues of frogs is the Kitchrid fungus, which is highly
deadly to lots of different frogs and has actually driven a couple of species extinct
and is crashing amphibian populations around the world.
And she's working on a project with our hard research scientist crew and is contributing

(31:44):
her pathology knowledge to that project.
So really proud of some of the amazing research that's getting done here.
So we do a lot of collaboration.
I give gonads to our reproductive people and they do gamete retrieval, which is really
exciting.
It sounds like a pretty shady under the table kind of deal there.

(32:06):
Yeah, everyone wants an all your like, hey, I got some some testes.
You want a you want a want a couple of testes?
And they're like, absolutely, please put it and chilled PBS for some gods and we'll
come and grab it.
And they're doing gamete retrieval.
And they what they do is they do it routinely to try and work out protocols for all of the
species that we have that are mammals and ideally even even in species that are not endangered.

(32:34):
If they work on protocols, the idea is that if there is an endangered species that is
closely related to them, they already have a protocol that works for something similar.
And ideally, they are going to be able to, you know, get their skills up on whatever comes
through as an opportunistic sample and then they can then then when the rubber hits the

(32:58):
road and they actually have to deal with something really rare that they're not they're not trying
that for the first time.
Yeah.
And sounds like that all the animals at the zoo are organ donors, whether they want to
be or not.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's all trying to make make it better when we take care of them and
try to preserve their species for the future.

(33:20):
So every every little bit that we can we can game post mortem just feeds right back into
trying to make sure that our care for them improves and our conservation of the species
is solid.
I love that makes sense.
We'll get back to the conversation shortly, but I wanted to tell you about how I can help
you find your fit.

(33:41):
I offer one-on-one career coaching services for experienced professionals for preparing
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(34:02):
found their fit, strategies and insights that might be helpful in your job search and content
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If you'd like to learn more, check out GoodFitCareers.com and follow me on LinkedIn.
Now back to the conversation.
In a bit of a philosophical sense, taking a step back here.
What does your work mean to you?

(34:24):
Oh, philosophically.
So on the one hand, I'm a little bit of like an optimistic nihilist.
Right.
I don't have a lot of strong beliefs in the meaning of life other than you can be kind

(34:47):
and you can try to have a positive impact.
Whatever that means to you.
And for me, having a positive impact is not just interpersonal kindness but like supporting
justice more widely and also recognizing that as a species that has a completely outsized
impact on our world, that we have a responsibility to make that impact as positive as possible.

(35:13):
Right.
With great power comes great responsibility.
And yeah.
So we as a species have enormous and some would say hubristic levels of power.
And if I can try to make my life have a positive impact on the ecosystems, the species, the

(35:37):
world around me, that is meaningful to me.
So that is what my work means to me.
It is a very small stone on a very big pile, but I'm putting my stone on that pile to try
and make the mountain that is conservation.
Wow.
How beautiful.
Can you tell us a little bit about a project or perhaps even more broadly the work that

(36:00):
you're most proud of?
Goodness professionally, I assume you mean because like, you know, I mean, letter rip.
My bread pudding recipe is amazing.
But professionally, that took a turn.
Yeah, you don't know.
Me in the kitchen, I'm just a wild woman.

(36:24):
I would say professionally things that I'm most proud of recently.
This is actually kind of it's tiny, but I'm really proud of it.
I just got accepted with with another co-author.
We put out a paper on gastrointestinal carcinomas in Heila monsters, which I'm very excited

(36:44):
about for a couple of reasons.
One, they're underreported in Heila monsters.
Two, Heila monsters are rad.
And three, knowing that they are likely to be in especially geriatric Heila monsters raises
the awareness for people who are taking care of Heila monsters to be on the lookout for

(37:06):
this disease and potentially affects the quality of life of Heila monsters in human
care everywhere.
And that's kind of like a little microcosm of what we try to do in pathology is like we
try to figure out what's going on so that the people who are actually dealing with live
animals can be more aware of what is likely to be happening.

(37:27):
And so I'm really excited to be contributing to the knowledge on Heila monsters.
Love that.
And just for fun, since this is an audio program, would you describe to us what a Heila
monster looks like?
Oh, these are great.
So they are chunky desert lizards.
So if you think of kind of like a really tank like Gecko, they're bigger than a Gecko

(37:54):
or like a really big skink.
And they have nubbly skin because they have osteoderms, which are these little plates
of bone, they're armored.
So they have these little plates of bone in their scales and in their skin.
And they are banded orange and black.
And yeah, so they just have this lovely little, little nubbly texture all over them.

(38:17):
And they are venomous.
They are the only confirmed venomous lizard.
There are some possible monitors that might have some, the jury's still out on them.
Heila monsters definitely venomous.
And yeah, so there are a venomous lizard.
There are two species in North America.

(38:37):
There are, there are Heila monsters and there are beaded lizards.
And those are both in the same Heila derma genus.
And they're just really cool.
And chunky headed, wide bodied, very tanky looking little little guys.
And I mean, they can get, they can get a good, I don't know, 18 inches long, like they can

(38:59):
get, they're a solid, they're a solid lizard.
Really pretty big.
Yeah.
What a great description.
I for.
I feel like what a great demonstration of your work to and just how vividly you describe
that creature I can see exactly what you were talking about in my mind's eye.
Well done.
Thank you.
I hope you, I hope you still Google that in all because they're great.

(39:20):
Yeah, we'll put a link to a good image in the show notes.
I would be remiss if I didn't ask you to teach us something.
And when we were preparing for this interview, we talked a little bit about the concept of
a post mortem.
This is a big thing in the business world, right?
And a lot of people who go through a project will do a pre mortem or a post mortem and
think through how they can work together better or have better outcomes next time.

(39:45):
I imagine that you are a world renowned expert in post mortems.
So would you teach us what you think of as a post mortem and how to, how to think through
like what we're supposed to be doing in this process?
So important things for approaching a post mortem is we look at the history first, right?

(40:07):
We want context.
We want to know what were the thought processes coming into this post mortem.
That includes not only the animal's personal history in my case, but also what the clinical
history was.
So what were the clinicians who treated this animal thinking about?
What sort of processes were they dealing with?

(40:27):
What sort of medications and interventions did they try?
So I want to know all of the context coming into it.
Some people think that you should not give pathologists history because it will bias
them.
It needs to bias me.
It should bias me.
I should understand context because context changes what is most likely to happen or what
the outcomes are.
So when I approach a post mortem, I want to know as much as I can about the thought processes

(40:50):
of everybody going into it and the physical processes of the animal.
And then I do, this is less metaphorical and more realistic.
I do out an external examination.
What can I see from the outside of that animal?
How can I approach this and see, okay, is there evidence of bleeding?
Is there evidence of swelling?

(41:10):
Is there any sort of damage to the hair coat that implies that maybe something underneath
might have been hit, right?
Trauma is a big cause of death in wildlife, right?
I mentioned that we do wild animals.
If I get a deer that has scuffed up fur in one spot, like I'm going to be more considering
that there might be something underneath there.

(41:32):
So I do a full external exam and then I start a very organized process of dismantling.
And there are books that specifically take you through that process and what limb you
reflect when.
And as long as I go through in an orderly fashion, I know that I'm going to see everything and

(41:55):
I examine every organ.
And then I take samples from every organ and I put them in a nice little bucket full of
formulant to preserve them.
And later those will get trimmed in and put on slides.
But I am going through this animal as a gross examination.

(42:15):
So what I can see with my naked eye, if I see anything odd that I think I might want
to know more about sooner, I can take an impression smear.
So I can basically take a slide, take a cut surface of whatever that was that's weird,
is that a tumor?
Is that maybe a little infectious nodule?
And I can put that slide on there and then maybe get some cells on that slide and then

(42:36):
examine them in the near future.
And then once I've taken samples of everything, we have to break down the car, put it in the
cooler for disposal.
And then that begins the next step.
The next step is those tissues have to fix for at least 24 hours, usually 48.
And then they get trimmed.

(42:57):
So sliced into smaller pieces, put into a cassette about the size of a matchbook.
And then those, informal and will be sent to a lab.
All the tissues that are in those individual cassettes, each cassette will correspond to
a slide.
So all of those tissues will get embedded into paraffin.
Cut like a little deli slicer, little slices of that gets put onto a slide, stained.

(43:18):
And then those slides either get sent back to me or uploaded as images onto a thing.
And then I read them.
I give diagnoses.
So that's the whole process of a post-mortem.
Throughout that process, I'm going to be looking into what the history of that particular
species in our collection was.
Have we seen anything like this in other animals of this species?

(43:39):
I'm going to be comparing to any normal tissues I have.
So for the metaphorical post-mortems that get done in business, maybe comparing to similar
projects that went well, and was that luck, or was that were there things that you could
do differently, that sort of thing?
But I do a lot of deep diving into what the possible outcomes could have been at all of

(44:07):
the steps.
And after doing, I would imagine, the thousands of these, how do you think about refining
and improving your methodology of conducting the post-mortem?
You know, the actual process is pretty solid.
After about, oh gosh, I don't want to guess how many thousands of necropsies that I've

(44:27):
done.
But it's several.
You get pretty solid on that process in terms of preparing yourself in advance.
Like, hey, this is a sudden death and a pacerine bird.
I'm going to make sure that I have little containers for taking frozen samples if I want
to test for any of a number of diseases that I know that can cause sudden death and a pacerine

(44:49):
bird.
I might already have my slides set out in case I want to do that impression smear.
Just being prepared in advance to do all of the diagnostics, because you never want
it to be hard.
You want to remove as many hoops to jump through as many friction points as possible so that

(45:12):
you don't skip something just because it's hard in the moment.
So preparing yourself, it's that proper planning prevents poor performance situation.
If you set yourself up to already have all of that stuff very close to hand, you're more
likely to have the opportunity to do those additional diagnostics.

(45:35):
So that helps.
And then talking to people, people with expertise, people who have had a similar case, people
who, you know, maybe we both have only had one of these animals, this particular species,
and we need to compare notes to see if there were similarities and differences.
So valuing the knowledge that is in your team is so important.

(45:58):
And being willing to ask for help, ask for questions, ask for ideas, because it is both,
I think one of the biggest compliments you can give someone is, hey, I value your opinion.
Can I get your brain on this?
Can we collaborate on this for a minute?
Not I'm asking you to do my work, but I'm asking you to help me appreciate your perspective

(46:24):
or your expertise.
I value your expertise.
So asking for help is a huge team building technique, and I cannot emphasize enough what
it means to me as a pathologist to have somebody upstairs.
Hey, the other day, one of the clinicians was like, hey, tomorrow, can I get your opinion

(46:45):
on this bare nipple goo?
And I said, well, I thought you'd never ask because gosh darn it.
Of course I want to give you my opinion.
First of all, I love giving my opinions, but especially on bare nipple goo, yes.
Who would turn that down?
So having someone solicit your opinion is a great team building side of things.

(47:08):
And one of the things I love about my team is that we're constantly like, hey, would
you look at this, even if I don't need an opinion, hey, just look at this so that you're
aware that this is happening in this species, getting people's buy in and making it, again,
low friction, easy for them to ask me, for my opinion, easy for everyone to ask for help

(47:29):
if they need it or if they're confused or if they want a little bit more, hey, you know,
I haven't seen a bunch of these, but you have, would you look at that?
It really, again, lowers that friction to make it easier to do the higher information
choice.
Hmm.
Fascinating.
If I were to think through and perhaps derive some of the core principles from what

(47:49):
you're sharing here, the first piece is, it sounds like thoroughly prepare, right?
Think through what's actually happening, what you're going to be looking at, try together
as much context as possible from there, follow a pretty standard procedure.
Do the same thing in the same way every time so you're getting good data and looking at
everything thoroughly.
Compare your results to previous similar projects or processes or examples and then seek outside

(48:13):
opinions and make it easy for the people providing those opinions to provide them.
Is that about right?
Yeah.
I do want to clarify that while the routine of the necropsy is pretty standard, always
be able to branch off and do things specific to that case, right?
You don't want to be so rigid that you can't adjust.

(48:33):
But yeah, in general, if you are fairly consistent, it will make a big difference in the ability
to see things.
You're not going to just like, oh, I want to skip ahead to that because that's the coolest
thing.
Just be consistent.
And sometimes I get excited and I have caught myself doing that.
Oh, no, I should have just stepped to the plan.
Stuck to the plan.

(48:54):
We had a plan for a reason.
You've worked with some really cool animals.
You spent a couple of years working on tortoises.
You've dissected an unzipped elephant.
You've gone through big cats.
I mean, you diagnosed a beaver from a smell.
Can you share some of your fun facts or favorite stories?
Some of your war stories, perhaps?

(49:16):
Fun facts.
Here's one that is not specific to what I specifically do, but it is a really fun fact.
Pepper spray only works on mammals.
This is an important safety announcement.
It will not save you from geese.
It will not save you from snakes.
It will not save you from sharks.
It will not save you from Velociraptors.
Do not use anything with capsaicin in it as a repellent for anything but mammals.

(49:41):
The receptor that mammals have for capsaicin, basically the capsaicin chemical was selected
to be a mammal repellent.
The peppers that developed this, evolved this, are distributed by birds.

(50:05):
Mammals destroy the seeds when they eat the fruit and birds don't.
The seeds pass through.
They germinate.
They're beautiful.
They're great.
The peppers needed something that was offensive to mammals but not to birds.
The selection pressure was specifically those pesky mammals keep eating our fruits.

(50:29):
It's selected for a compound that does not bother birds at all.
It lights up the inside of the mouth or other places on a mammal.
That is what happens.
Capsaicin, which is the active component of pepper spray, don't expect that to help you
with it for anything.
I tell the police officers here that because there's zoo police, make sure that everything

(50:52):
is go up as that I can say.
I'm like, hey, just FYI, I know you've got some less than lethal options that include
spray.
If anything's out and coming at you, if it's a mammal, go ahead and use it.
If it's not, sorry, friend, that's not so there you go.
That's your fun fact is I've also got the fact that poison dart frogs are not poisonous

(51:18):
if they are not eating poisonous insects.
Poison dart frogs in our collection are fed normal insects basically.
In the wild, they eat a lot of different beetles and bugs and they bioaccumulate toxins and
resocrete them in their skin.
They don't manufacture it themselves.

(51:38):
It's an accumulation of resocretion.
In human care, they are not eating those same bugs.
They are not, but please don't lick them anyway.
It's very traumatic for the frog.
Really?
Yeah, don't do that.
Also, it's a good way to get salmonella.
Don't do that.
Just it's bad all around.
Please don't lick any of the animals.
Well, if we must.

(52:00):
Don't do it.
Okay.
Yeah, not because they will poison you, but because it will be upsetting for them.
It's just rude.
Yeah.
So that's a fun one.
Those are great.
How do you think the world sees your job?
I don't think the world sees my job.
I don't think this is a job that most people think about.

(52:22):
That's okay because a lot of times the first veterinary pathologist that they ever meet
is me.
I get to be their first impression, which is a little bit.
Pretty awesome.
I enjoy it.
I don't know.
Maybe it makes the rest of the veterinary pathologists that they might meet look bad.
But for most people who are not in veterinary medicine, I am the first veterinary pathologist

(52:42):
they meet and I work at the National Zoo, Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation
Biology Institute.
Like, I have the...
I do sometimes just say I work at the local zoo because there's...
It is the closest one where I lived.
And I get to talk about really cool stuff.
I even have a shirt somewhere that says I poke dead things with sticks for you, citizen,

(53:03):
because I'm a federal employee.
And I love that.
Yeah.
So I don't think the world thinks about me.
And that's okay.
For the folks who might be aware of veterinary pathology, what do you think they think that
you do at work?

(53:23):
If they know a veterinary pathology is already, then they have a pretty good idea, right?
But I do...
I look at things under a microscope and I take apart things that are not small enough to
look at under a microscope.
They probably don't think about how many biopsies that we do here, right?
If something looks weird, we're going to take a biopsy of it, but also anything that comes

(53:45):
out for surgical reasons we look at under the microscope.
And cheetahs, for example, are very prone to gastrointestinal disease, specifically gastric
issues.
They routinely have biopsies taken for them just to keep an eye on where they're at.
So they have monitoring sort of wellness biopsies that we take for them.

(54:08):
So I don't think that a lot of people know about that specifically.
But when I say, you know, I do post mortems on everything at the zoo, then they go everything
and I'm like, corals up to elephants.
And they might be surprised about the corals, but you know, elephant, they got a pretty

(54:30):
good idea what that is.
That is a long day is what that is with like 20 people.
It takes a lot to dismantle an elephant.
That's a lot.
I bet.
Fascinating.
So let's say that there are people out there who haven't really figured out their path in
their professional life.
What sort of expectations would you set for someone who is interested in joining your

(54:53):
field?
I think there are lots of ways to contribute to the broader field, just conservation.
And they're not all even science, right?
So there's lots of, lots of steam aspect.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of communications and there's a lot of arts that actually go
into conservation as well because the science is almost the easy part.

(55:15):
Getting people to care and telling the story is the hard part.
So, so I would like to put out there that like, even if you're not a hardcore science
person, you can still contribute to conservation narrowly as a veterinary pathologist.
If you're interested in zoo pathology specifically, there are some great resources out there for
veterinary pathology.
The Davis Thompson Foundation does a lot of YouTube videos and things that are about pathology.

(55:40):
I've got a couple of, I got a lecture up there, but there's lots and lots of material
available through the Davis Thompson Foundation for anatomic pathology.
The Joint Pathology Center, which is actually part of the Army, has the veterinary systemic
pathology online, which has slides from lots of different species and you can select them
through a, there's like a nice little checkbox.

(56:04):
I want to look at urinary system and I want to look at infectious disease and I want to
look at it in bovids and you can actually kind of drill down from there and look at cases
that have beautiful case write-ups and example slides.
There is the Wednesday Slide Conference from Joint Pathology Center that is also accessible.
So there's lots of anatomic pathology stuff that you can start to learn if you're a vet

(56:26):
student or if you're interested in doing pathology and like getting, getting, getting your,
getting a little taste of it, get your feet wet, wet, those kinds of resources are great.
If you are interested in doing pathology, I would say get as much experience as you can
with necropsies.
Even though I am a zoo pathologist, I will point out that many zoo animals are basically

(56:50):
cattle.
They're ruminants, right?
So being comfortable with cattle medicine and small ruminant medicine is really important
in zoo medicine because a lot of those diseases cross over or have similar presentations.
Ruminants have a very specific physiology and that translates.

(57:13):
Dogs and cats translate to our carnivores very well.
So being solid on all of your basics of veterinary medicine allows you to have those foundations
to sort of expand.
And then getting experience in fish and amphibian and reptile medicine, bird medicine, those
sorts of things.
As long as you make sure that you get a nice broad experience for a foundation, I think

(57:37):
that's a really great place to start if you're interested in non-domestic pathology or conservation
pathology.
Tremendous.
How fascinating.
To take a big step back here and think at a really macro to broad level, what are you
excited about for the future?
I'm really excited at some of the visualization technologies that have come out in the past

(57:58):
decade or so in terms of detecting molecules in situ.
Let me break that down.
There are techniques now where you can detect on a slide where you can actually see the organization
of the tissue genetic material.
You can see in situ hybridization, so basically you're targeting specific genetic components.

(58:24):
There's also ways to identify specific RNA, not just DNA.
So you can see both RNA viruses, but also your cells use RNA as a messenger and also
as a functional component.
They're actually doing things in the cells.
You can see what your cells are getting up to with a lot of these visualization technologies.

(58:47):
Those are really amazing.
I think that microbiomes are getting a lot more investment in terms of research time now,
and those are going to be really important to understanding health as well.
I think we've only hit the tip of the iceberg.
I like to say that the history of medicine has started with mechanisms.

(59:09):
It's broken.
You can sew it back together.
You can straighten it out.
That's very, very mechanical.
Then you can put something inside your body and it will change how your body works.
That's medicine.
Then we got to, oh, things are coming into your body that shouldn't come into your body.
That's germ theory.
But germ theory assumed that an organism would give you an illness.

(59:36):
That assumption is flawed.
It's true in some cases, but it ignores a bunch of context.
That context is that none of us are just an organism.
We're an ecosystem.
We have microbiomes on our skin.
We have microbiomes in our GI tract.
We have microbiomes in our respiratory tract in our, all of our tracts.
You are engaging with the anywhere that you touch anything that's not you.

(59:59):
You are a whole ecosystem.
Understanding how those ecosystems work will allow us to understand health better and not
just this one thing gave me this one disease.
My health is affected by entire populations and shifts in those populations.
My ability to defend myself against one organism or a set of organisms or a condition is affected

(01:00:22):
by that.
I think that after genetics became a thing and we could understand how genes worked, which
we're still honestly, we're still in the infancy of understanding how they all interact.
Understanding that it's not just our genomes, but our entire ecosystem, understanding the
complexity of the ecosystems that we contain.

(01:00:45):
I contain multitudes, right?
Which is a great book, by the way, on this particular topic by Ed Young.
Genomes is a place in the future that I'm looking to learn much more about and see how
that affects our ability to care for our animals.
Tremendous.
It really sounds like you love your job and you could get absolutely lost in what you're

(01:01:07):
doing day to day.
My last kind of formal question here is, has nothing to do with work?
What do you like to do to waste time?
Oh, is time ever wasted?
I don't know.
We have a wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver likes to say, our one wild and precious life.

(01:01:29):
Things that I like to be outside, I like to be in nature.
So I have the outdoorsy side, but I also have an indoorsy side.
I have a very strong indoorsy side.
I love to read books.
I love to cook.
I love to eat.
I love to play video games.
I've been spending so much time in Baldur's Gate 3.
Nice.
That's a good one.

(01:01:49):
So I have put a lot of hours into that gate.
It's huge.
So those are things that I like to do in my spare time.
So sometimes we'll go fossil hunting.
My partner and I, and the Potomac has a ton of fossils.
This whole area has some amazing fossils along it.
It's got huge geological formations.
I like to go into the woods and roll over logs and look for amphibians and all kinds

(01:02:15):
of critters that live under logs and rocks.
So we go herping every once in a while, go paddle boarding.
Big into that.
Love going out onto the water.
Hiking, that sort of thing.
The occasional foraging, where it's legal.
I brought home a really great chicken of the woods the other week that was just in, it
was like two or three pounds of mushroom.

(01:02:37):
That's great.
Nice.
And that's not a wild chicken.
That's a mushroom, right?
That's a mushroom.
Yeah.
So it's a big mushroom.
It's a big delicious mushroom.
That's awesome.
Very certain before you eat any mushroom, but chicken of the woods is pretty distinct.
Yeah.
So those are things I like to do in my spare time.
That's wonderful.
Dr. Hol, you've been so very generous with your time and with your wisdom.

(01:02:59):
I am so very grateful.
Is there anything that you'd like to promote or share with the audience?
Yeah, I think there's, if you're curious, if you're curious, or if you have kids that
are curious, I know that a lot of people are curious as to like, how much can our kids
get to learn about zoos if they're not near a zoo?

(01:03:22):
We have really great educational content on our website.
The zoo's website has a whole education department.
And I'm a little bit biased because I'm married to one of the educators there, but the content
is amazing.
It's actually award-winning.
It's really phenomenal content.
It has everything from videos that you can watch about different topics that match up with

(01:03:44):
educational standards and things like that for whole classrooms or for individuals.
And it also has some interactive programs that you can sign up for that are completely
free and frequently have like live animals on the live program.
And you can ask questions about that specific animal and get to hear about that specific
animal.
They're fantastic.

(01:04:05):
If you are a person who is on your career track looking to be an anatomic pathologist,
I mentioned that Davis Thompson Foundation has amazing amount of material.
The Joint Pathology Center has an amazing amount of material that are great training
materials for people who are interested in that.
They are accessible.
Some of them are free, but there are also courses that you would have to subscribe to.

(01:04:28):
But great stuff in those departments as well.
Wonderful.
Any parting words of advice for aspiring veterinarians or veterinary pathologists?
Some of the best advice that I was ever given when I first started this, the first veterinary
pathologist that I ever met.
I was like, I want your job.
You work at a zoo and you're a pathologist.

(01:04:48):
This is so cool.
And he said, show up and do the work.
And on the one hand, it's a little bit glib.
And on the other hand, I also recognize that the opportunity to show up and do the work,
especially if it's unpaid, is not available to everyone.
So while that is very good advice in terms of doing the work is sometimes the best training

(01:05:08):
and also the best way to prove that you can do the work.
Also remember to open the doors behind you.
If you got into a place because you had experience that was unpaid, do what you can to make
it available to people who cannot afford to be there if they're not paid.
Encourage scholarship building.

(01:05:30):
Encourage stipends.
Find ways to partner with organizations that would like to sponsor students.
But try to open those doors behind you.
So that's a thing that I think is really important to me.
That yes, showing up and doing the work will get you pretty far.
Making sure that the ability to show up and do the work is available to more people is

(01:05:52):
important.
How tremendous.
Kali
, thank you so very much for sharing your perspective.
This was a Delight.
I had so much fun, Ryan.
Thank you for having me on.
It was a pleasure.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe for new episodes, leave a review,

(01:06:16):
and tell a friend.
Good Fit Careers is hosted by me, Ryan Dickerson, and is produced and edited by Melo-Vox Productions.
Marketing is by StoryAngled and our theme music is by Surftronica with additional music
from Andrew Espronceda.
I'd like to express my gratitude to all of our guests for sharing their time, stories,
and perspectives with us.

(01:06:37):
And finally, thank you to all of our listeners.
If you have any recommendations on future guests, questions, or comments, please send
us an email at [e-mail].