What Is Veterinary Science? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

What Is Veterinary Science, Exactly?

Veterinary science is the branch of biomedical science concerned with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease and injury in animals, and with the broader study of animal physiology, health, and welfare across species. It sits at the intersection of clinical medicine, biology, and public health: veterinarians and veterinary researchers work not only on individual-animal care (companion animals, livestock, horses, exotic and wildlife species) but on population-level animal health, food safety, and the transmission of disease between animals and humans.

The field is sometimes used interchangeably with “veterinary medicine,” but the two terms carry a useful distinction. Veterinary medicine most often refers to the clinical practice of diagnosing and treating animal patients. Veterinary science is the broader research and scientific discipline underneath that practice — the physiology, pathology, pharmacology, immunology, and epidemiology that clinical veterinary medicine applies. A veterinary researcher may never see a clinical patient, working instead on vaccine development, comparative disease models, or herd-level epidemiology, while still operating squarely within veterinary science.

How Veterinary Science Relates to Neighboring Disciplines

Veterinary science overlaps substantially with several neighboring fields covered elsewhere on CASRAI. It shares core methodology with biology (physiology, genetics, anatomy) and with epidemiology, whose population-level disease-tracking methods apply directly to herd health, zoonotic surveillance, and food-animal production systems. It connects closely to agricultural science through livestock and food-animal medicine, and to human medicine through comparative medicine and the One Health framework — the recognition, formalized by organizations including the World Health Organization, the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, formerly OIE), and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that human, animal, and environmental health are interconnected and that a majority of emerging infectious diseases in humans originate in animals — the same One Health lens that connects veterinary science to public health as a discipline. Veterinary science also underpins laboratory animal medicine, the clinical and welfare discipline responsible for the health and humane care of animals used in biomedical research — a topic CASRAI covers in depth elsewhere (see the related resources below).

Major Subfields of Veterinary Science

• Clinical veterinary medicine — diagnosis and treatment across species-specific practice areas: small-animal (companion animal) medicine, large-animal and food-animal (livestock) medicine, equine medicine, and exotic/zoo/wildlife medicine.
• Veterinary surgery — soft-tissue, orthopedic, and increasingly minimally invasive and specialty surgical techniques adapted across species with very different anatomy and physiology.
• Veterinary pathology — anatomic pathology (necropsy and tissue diagnosis) and clinical pathology (bloodwork, cytology, and laboratory diagnostics); a foundational discipline for both clinical diagnosis and disease research.
• Veterinary microbiology, virology, and immunology — the study of infectious agents affecting animals, including pathogens with zoonotic potential (able to transfer between animals and humans), and the animal immune response to infection and vaccination.
• Veterinary epidemiology and public health — disease surveillance in animal populations, herd/flock-level outbreak investigation, food safety, and zoonotic disease control, closely tied to the One Health framework described above.
• Veterinary pharmacology and toxicology — drug action, dosing, and safety across species with substantially different metabolism (a dose safe in one species can be toxic in another), plus the study of poisoning and environmental toxin exposure in animals.
• Theriogenology — animal reproduction, including reproductive physiology, fertility, and assisted reproduction, particularly significant in livestock and equine production.
• Comparative medicine — the use of animal models and cross-species physiological comparison to advance both veterinary and human medicine; the discipline that most directly bridges veterinary science and human biomedical research.
• Laboratory animal medicine — the veterinary specialty responsible for the health, welfare, and humane clinical care of animals used in biomedical research, working alongside institutional animal care and use committees (IACUCs) and attending veterinarians (see the related CASRAI resources below for CASRAI’s existing deep coverage of this specific area).

Who Funds Veterinary Science Research

Veterinary science research in the United States draws on a mix of federal agencies and private foundations, several of which fund it as one part of a broader biomedical or agricultural research mission rather than as a dedicated “veterinary” program:

• National Institutes of Health (NIH) — funds veterinary-relevant research primarily through its focus on comparative medicine and animal models of human disease rather than through a single dedicated veterinary institute. NIH’s Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (ORIP), housed in the Office of the Director, supports comparative medicine resources, animal model development, and training relevant to veterinary and biomedical researchers working across species. Individual NIH institutes — for example the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — also fund zoonotic and infectious disease research that directly involves animal hosts and veterinary expertise.
• U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) — the primary federal funder of animal-health and food-animal veterinary research, chiefly through the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), which funds competitive grants spanning animal health, animal well-being, and food-animal production. USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) additionally plays a regulatory role in animal disease control that intersects with veterinary research, though APHIS itself is a regulator rather than a research funder (CASRAI covers APHIS-adjacent regulatory requirements elsewhere — see the Interstate Certificate of Veterinary Inspection guide linked below).
• National Science Foundation (NSF) — funds basic, non-clinical research touching veterinary science through its Directorate for Biological Sciences, particularly in comparative physiology, animal behavior, and ecology/disease-transmission research rather than clinical veterinary medicine specifically.
• Private foundations — several established nonprofit foundations fund veterinary and animal-health research directly, most notably Morris Animal Foundation, a long-established U.S. nonprofit that funds studies on companion animal, equine, and wildlife health. Species- or disease-focused foundations (for example those supporting canine or feline health specifically) also fund targeted veterinary research programs; verify a given foundation’s current funding priorities and eligibility directly on its own site before citing specifics, as program details change over funding cycles.

Researchers should always confirm current program names, deadlines, and funding priorities directly with the funding body, since federal programs in particular are reorganized and re-scoped between budget cycles.

Research Methods, Tools, and Equipment

Veterinary science draws on the same core toolkit as human biomedical research, adapted for the practical realities of working across many species:

• Clinical and diagnostic imaging — radiography, ultrasound, and increasingly CT and MRI, adapted for anatomy that varies enormously by species and often requiring sedation or anesthesia that clinical human imaging does not.
• Clinical pathology and laboratory diagnostics — hematology, serum chemistry, cytology, and microbiological culture, with species-specific reference ranges rather than a single human-normal baseline.
• Necropsy and histopathology — post-mortem examination and tissue-level diagnosis, central to both individual case diagnosis and population-level disease surveillance.
• Epidemiological and biostatistical methods — herd-level and population-level disease modeling, surveillance data analysis, and outbreak investigation, using the same core study-design and analytic toolkit covered in CASRAI’s epidemiology guide.
• Molecular and genomic tools — PCR-based pathogen detection, sequencing, and increasingly genomics applied to livestock breeding and disease resistance.
• Animal models and comparative research infrastructure — laboratory animal facilities operating under institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) oversight, following practices detailed in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (see the related resources below for CASRAI’s dedicated coverage of this regulatory and welfare framework).

Career and Training Pathways

The standard credential for clinical veterinary practice in North America is the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM or, at a small number of institutions, VMD), a professional doctoral degree typically requiring around four years of study following an undergraduate degree with strong coursework in the biological and physical sciences. In the United States, DVM programs are accredited by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) Council on Education (COE), and graduates of accredited programs sit the North American Veterinary Licensing Examination (NAVLE) as the standard path to state/provincial licensure to practice.

Veterinarians who want to specialize beyond general practice pursue a postgraduate internship and residency, then board certification through one of the AVMA-recognized veterinary specialty colleges — for example the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM), the American College of Veterinary Surgeons (ACVS), or the American College of Veterinary Pathologists (ACVP), among others, each covering a distinct clinical or research specialty.

Veterinary science careers that are primarily research-focused rather than clinical — comparative medicine, veterinary epidemiology, or laboratory animal medicine, for instance — often combine the DVM with a research doctorate (PhD) or a master’s-level research program, sometimes through a combined DVM/PhD track. The Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC) is the principal professional body representing accredited veterinary colleges in the U.S. and Canada and is a useful starting point for prospective students researching accredited programs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between veterinary medicine and veterinary science?

Veterinary medicine most often refers to the clinical practice of diagnosing and treating animal patients. Veterinary science is the broader scientific discipline that underlies that practice, spanning physiology, pathology, pharmacology, epidemiology, and comparative research — work that a veterinary scientist may do without ever seeing a clinical patient.

What does a veterinary researcher actually do, as opposed to a practicing veterinarian?

A practicing veterinarian diagnoses and treats individual animal patients in a clinical setting. A veterinary researcher more often works on questions that apply across a species or population — developing vaccines or diagnostics, studying disease transmission, running animal-model studies relevant to human medicine, or analyzing herd-level health data — frequently in a university, government, or industry laboratory rather than a clinic.

How do you become a veterinarian in the United States?

The standard path is an undergraduate degree with substantial science coursework, followed by a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) from a program accredited by the AVMA Council on Education, then passing the North American Veterinary Licensing Examination (NAVLE) for state/provincial licensure. Veterinarians who want board certification in a clinical or research specialty complete an additional internship, residency, and examination through the relevant AVMA-recognized specialty college.

Is veterinary science the same as animal science?

No — the two overlap but are distinct. Animal science, closer to agricultural science, focuses on livestock production, nutrition, and breeding for agricultural purposes. Veterinary science is centered on animal health, disease, and clinical/comparative medicine across all species, companion and production animals alike, and requires clinical veterinary training that animal science does not.

Related CASRAI Resources

Veterinary science connects to CASRAI’s existing coverage of the regulatory and research-administration side of animal-based research, and to several neighboring disciplines in this same branches-of-science series:

• Branches of Science — the hub guide for this discipline series.
• What Is Biology? — the broader life-science discipline veterinary science draws its core methods from.
• What Is Epidemiology? — the population-health methodology underlying veterinary epidemiology and zoonotic disease surveillance.
• What Is Agricultural Science? — the closely related discipline covering livestock production, nutrition, and breeding.
• The IACUC and Animal Research Oversight — how institutional animal care and use committees regulate animal-based research, a framework veterinary and laboratory animal medicine operate within.
• Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals — the foundational reference standard for laboratory animal care.
• Animal Research Ethics — the 3Rs, IACUC oversight, and the legal framework for animal research.
• Veterinary Medicine Authorship Criteria — how AVMA/JAVMA define authorship in veterinary-journal publishing.
• Attending Veterinarian (AV) — the regulatory role a research facility’s veterinarian holds under the Animal Welfare Act.
• Animal Welfare Act (AWA) — the core U.S. federal law governing animal care in research and other regulated settings.
• 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement) — the guiding ethical framework for animal research design.