One Health Institute

Participants in Rx One Health Field Institute this year continue to explore Ireland through the interconnected lenses of human, animal, plant, and environmental health. From sustainable food systems and biodiversity to marine ecosystems, water quality, conservation, risk communication, and disaster preparedness, each day of the course has offered new perspectives on today's complex health challenges.

Learning has extended far beyond just the classroom with visits to the Phoenix Park Biodiversity Centre, Dublin Zoo, the Marine Institute , Grattan Beach and Galway Atlantaquaria, and Lyons Farm. Along the way, participants have learned from experts across Dublin and Galway alongside visiting faculty from UC Davis, creating a collaborative exchange of One Health expertise across the Atlantic.

Now, as interdisciplinary capstone projects get underway, Rx One Health participants are bringing together the knowledge, perspectives, and partnerships they've built to develop solutions for real-world One Health challenges.

This , we’re highlighting how collaboration and innovation needed to help protect some of the world’s most vulnerable wildlife.

For years, researchers faced a difficult challenge with critically endangered right whales: how do we gather the movement and habitat data needed to protect them from threats like entanglement, vessel strikes, and climate-driven ecosystem change without compromising the wellbeing of the animals themselves?

Through a long-term international collaboration supported by NOAA and the U.S. Office of Naval Research, scientists and veterinarians worked to develop less invasive satellite tags designed specifically with whale welfare in mind. Our field veterinarian Dr. Marcela Uhart leads the animal health and welfare aspects of the project, helping ensure the highest standards of research ethics while advancing critical conservation science.

The resulting “blubber-only” tag design provides researchers with valuable movement and habitat-use data while reducing invasiveness compared to traditional approaches. Having already been successfully deployed with free-ranging southern right whales, these tags offer important tools for studying and protecting their endangered northern counterparts.

The data collected from these tags can help inform efforts to reduce human-caused threats and better protect endangered whale populations in a rapidly changing ocean. The impact of this work extends beyond a single species. By improving how wildlife research is conducted, these collaborations help shape safer, more ethical approaches that can benefit other marine mammals and endangered species around the world.

Image description: North Atlantic right whale breaching above the ocean surface.