The Digitalization of the Vivarium: Past and Present Initiatives that Optimize Animal Care and Welfare

John has been part of the Laboratory Animal Community since the early 1970's. Past experiences at academic Institutions, transgenic cores, imaging and phenotyping cores, large pharma, CROs and even being a vendor have provided an extensive amount of exposure to different operating, management and administrative systems for this community. Different roles at these facilities as Associate Professor, Clinician, Manager, Associate Director, Director, Senior Director, Administrator and Owner have given him much greater appreciation of the vast impacts and responsibilities of our community. The hands-on experience and involvement with animal model development, animal health maintenance, surgical model development and maintenance of geriatric animals in both GLP and non GLP (primarily academic) environments has led him to an acute awareness of how dynamic these areas are and how they are consistently evolving. The current challenge of study reproducibility while maintaining high translation science is an area of great interest. Being a Lab Animal Veterinarian (first and foremost) his major focus has been and continues to be looking at how animal research is conducted and to strive to continuously improve and understand the outcomes to the animals, the staff and the research. He has looked extensively at microenvironments and their impacts on the animals as this is a true passion of his.