When Teresa Sylvina was in grade school,  she spent many afternoons at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center Hospital for large animals, where her mother worked in the business office, watching the veterinarians perform surgeries and autopsies on cows, pigs, goats, and horses. “It was fascinating,” she says. “I watched everything they did, and now I realize what a gift that was.”

Those afternoons inspired Sylvina ’80 Sci, now attending veterinarian for laboratory animals at University Park, to attend Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine after graduating from Penn State. The award-winning vet developed that skill early in life, she says, because New Bolton’s head anesthesiologist at the time would often take her out on his rounds, showing her how to effectively administer acupuncture and other cutting-edge therapies to reduce pain in horses. Sylvina is in charge of the health and well-being of the thousands of rats, mice, rabbits, ferrets, and other animals for University Park labs; she has overall responsibility for ensuring they remain healthy from start to finish of a particular study. “If the animal isn’t healthy, the science will be compromised,” she says. Sylvina ensures that every experiment involving a lab animal meets the stringent protocols and strict ethical guidelines in place for the humane care of lab animals—and she also keeps tabs on experiments to determine if they can be done without a lab animal. Those instances, she says, are rare. Bearing in mind that all necessary protocols must be met, “it’s only when you conduct research in a lab animal that it’s possible to know if there’s an indication it could work in a human,” Sylvina says, “whether or not the complexity of living, integrated bodily systems will accept or reject such an intervention.” 

Sylvina worked at MIT after vet school and paid off her student loans working in emergency vet clinics. She also worked as attending veterinarian at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and director of the animal research department at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She joined Penn State from the National Academy of Sciences. 

Sylvina also spent more than a decade in Tanzania’s remote Mahale Mountains studying chimpanzees infected by a human virus. Passionate about the project—and the place—she led research and fundraising efforts that resulted in the creation of a solar-powered, eco-friendly portable field lab to study chimpanzee health. She also founded a One Health nonprofit, Bush-To-Base Solutions, which brings scientific inquiry to the challenges of animal, human, and environmental health and well-being in resource-limited settings.