Meet Our Speakers

Izabela de Assis Rocha, BVM, PhD, is originally from Brazil, where she obtained her Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM) degree from the Federal University of Lavras in 2016. During her veterinary training, she received a scholarship through the Brazilian Scientific Mobility Program for a research internship at the Univer-sity of Kentucky in 2013. Her research project contributed to developing the ELISA test commercially available for equine protozoal myeloencephalitis (EPM) diagnosis. After obtaining her BVM, Dr. Rocha pursued a resi-dency in Equine Medicine at the Federal University of Minas Gerais from 2017-2019. She then returned to the University of Kentucky for further research training, focused on investigating therapeutic approaches for EPM. She was awarded a 2-year Merck Animal Health Research Fellowship in 2022 and received her Ph.D. in Veteri-nary Sciences in May/2024. Currently, Dr. Rocha is a postdoctoral scholar at the Gluck Equine Research Center.