Meet Dr. Erin Lashnits

Dr. Erin Lashnits recently joined the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine as an assistant professor of internal medicine. Her primary research focus is infectious diseases in cats—including feline infectious peritonitis and vector-borne diseases.

What was your path to veterinary medicine?

After my undergraduate education at Stanford University, I worked at a basic science research lab at UC San Francisco. We were investigating cancer, angiogenesis, and chronic inflammation and I really enjoyed it, but realized that I didn’t want to be purely a bench scientist though I really liked working with the mouse colony. That set me on the path to being a veterinarian. I started volunteering at the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and found that I really loved working with the dogs and cats there.

What sparked your interest in academia?

 I’ve always wanted to do research and work as a scientist as well as a clinician, and academia was the place to do that. As I spend more time in academia, I find that I have really grown and can add to the practice of veterinary medicine. It’s one thing to be a good doctor and it’s another thing—that feels really valuable to me—to be able to teach other people to be good doctors.   

What drives your interest in feline research particularly?

Fewer people bring their cats to the veterinarian so it’s a bit more of an at-risk and underserved population, although they can have just as many diseases and problems as dogs. There are many ways we can help with low hanging fruit interventions that are easy and somewhat inexpensive but can improve lives. A lot of what I study is infectious disease and zoonotic disease, and there are some interesting and scary diseases that cats carry that can transmit to people.

What brought you to UC Davis?

There are so many opportunities for collaboration within the school itself among basic science researchers, and within the medical school. Davis has always been on my radar, with its great reputation and opportunities, as well as amazing research, cool cases and the ability to advance care for pets.

How does the CCAH support your research?

CCAH funds a lot of the work to advance feline infectious peritonitis research and without this type of funding, we would not have been able to cure this disease. Now that it is curable, a lot of the funds that we get from CCAH and its donors help with making treatment more accessible and easier both for the cats and their human caretakers. I also study a disease called Bartonella that is transmitted between fleas and cats. From the cats and their fleas, it can jump into people and dogs. I study the whole cycle and what diseases, symptoms, and manifestations it causes in cats, people, and dogs. It is a bit of a niche topic, not a big hot topic like COVID or Lyme disease. It probably plays a bigger role in pets’ health than we realize but it can be harder to find larger scale funding to look at the impact of the disease on the pets themselves. CCAH helps funds those types of studies.

What is a cool fact about cats?

Tabby cats are cats that have some amount of stripes, and the tabby pattern is super dominant, so somewhere around 80 percent of mix-breed cats are tabby cats. Calicos and tortoiseshells come from the same coat color pattern genetic, and so both calicos and tortoiseshells have to be female or have XXY chromosomes if they’re male because for that coat color, you need both X chromosomes.