AVMA spotlights advocacy careers through Dr. Jacey Cerda

The AVMA is using its My Veterinary Life podcast to make a broader case for advocacy as a veterinary career pathway, this time through a conversation with Dr. Jacey Cerda about the AVMA Government Relations Externship and where that experience can lead. Cerda’s profile is unusually cross-disciplinary: she has worked as a veterinarian, attorney, researcher, and public health professional, and is now focused on biodiversity conservation and emergency response at Colorado State University. (fulbright.org.au)

That message fits into a larger AVMA content push around organized veterinary medicine. Other recent My Veterinary Life episodes have highlighted early-career veterinarians finding roles in leadership, advocacy, and professional associations, suggesting the Cerda episode is part of a sustained effort to show students and new graduates that influence in veterinary medicine isn’t limited to clinical practice. Based on AVMA’s broader advocacy messaging, the organization is trying to connect individual career development with profession-wide policy engagement. (avma.org)

Cerda is a strong vehicle for that message because her career has moved across several adjacent fields. Public profiles describe her as a clinical veterinarian, attorney, and postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University. Fulbright materials say she is spending 2024-2025 at Federation University in Australia, examining lessons from the country’s response to the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires, with the goal of building better frameworks and training programs for wildlife and ecosystem disaster response. Federation University’s announcement adds that the fires helped prompt her transition from legal work into conservation veterinary medicine, underscoring how policy, emergency management, and clinical expertise can intersect in one career. (fulbright.org.au)

While the podcast itself is framed as a career conversation, the surrounding policy environment makes the topic more than aspirational. AVMA is currently active on federal workforce and access issues, including backing the Rural Veterinary Workforce Act, reintroduced on March 27, 2025. The association says the bill would expand the impact of the Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program by ending federal taxation on awards, a change AVMA argues could help recruit and retain veterinarians in USDA-designated shortage areas. That gives added context to an episode about government relations: advocacy training is increasingly tied to real legislative fights affecting practice economics and access to care. (avma.org)

Direct outside commentary on this specific podcast episode was limited in open web results, but the industry context is clear. AVMA’s own advocacy pages emphasize that the organization monitors legislative and regulatory developments, alerts members to emerging issues, and amplifies veterinary professionals’ policy engagement. In that sense, Cerda’s story functions less as a one-off profile and more as an example of the profession’s expanding definition of impact, from Capitol Hill to conservation response systems. That’s an inference based on AVMA’s recent advocacy and career-positioning content. (avma.org)

Why it matters: For veterinarians, practice leaders, and students, the practical takeaway is that policy fluency is becoming more valuable, not less. Regulatory change, workforce shortages, student debt, rural access gaps, public health preparedness, and disaster response all affect daily veterinary work, even for clinicians who never plan to work in government. Cerda’s trajectory illustrates how advocacy experiences like the AVMA Government Relations Externship can build skills that translate into leadership roles across clinical medicine, academia, nonprofit work, and emergency management. It also reflects a profession increasingly asked to operate in One Health and systems-based settings, where legislative and regulatory decisions shape what care is possible for animals and pet parents. (fulbright.org.au)

What to watch: The near-term question is whether AVMA’s advocacy storytelling translates into more student and early-career participation in organized veterinary medicine, and whether federal policy efforts on workforce and loan relief gain traction in Congress over the next session. Cerda’s own work is also worth following, because it may produce models for wildlife disaster preparedness that could inform future veterinary roles in emergency response and conservation policy. (avma.org)