BLACKSBURG, Va., March 17 -- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University issued the following news release:
Kirsten Masters grew up on a dairy farm in Bedford, Pennsylvania, surrounded by pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle. She showed animals through 4-H for 10 years. She loved agriculture and working with animals, and she assumed that was the path forward.
Then she discovered mathematics.
"I really fell in love with the modeling aspect of everything, especially infectious disease modeling," said Masters, now a DVM/Ph.D. student in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. "I always wanted to find something that wouldn't cause me to pick one side or the other."
She found th...