In her lecture, "Breaking Barriers: Women Leading the Future of Agriculture and Livestock," Dr. Salma Sultana shared her career path as a veterinarian from Bangladesh.
Throughout her career, she has worked to close the gap between education and training and small-scale livestock farmers. Not only did she complete outreach work, but she also founded several organizations within Bangladesh to offer support and training to livestock farmers.
In 2014, Sultana founded Bangladesh's first vocational training institute: the Model Livestock Institute. This institute educates livestock service providers and creates sustainable employment opportunities in rural Bangladesh.
In 2015, Sultana founded the Model Livestock Institute Veterinary Hospital, the first non-government outdoor veterinary hospital in Bangladesh. Later, the hospital developed VetSheba, a call center and online service for livestock health needs, expanding the hospital's reach to more than 5000 farmers over the last 10 years.
In 2016, Sultana founded the Model Livestock Advancement Foundation to promote rural development. One project was the "One Health Approach," which trained students and butchers on food-borne diseases and zoonotic disease transmission. Another project trained 100 female smallholder farmers in goat husbandry.
In 2020, Sultana received the Norman E. Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application from the World Food Prize Foundation for her outreach work benefitting small-scale farmers in Bangladesh.
Dr. Sultana is currently pursuing a PhD in Microbiology through the Interdepartmental Microbiology Graduate Program at Iowa State University. Her doctoral research focuses on evaluating the effects of histotripsy on bacterial diseases, immune responses and strategies for mitigating AMR.
This lecture was co-sponsored by IAAS, Sigma Alpha, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Iowa State University Lecture Series.