Jerri Bartholomew, the Emile F. Pernot Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Microbiology was selected as a 2019 Fellow of the American Fisheries Society, the world’s oldest and largest organization dedicated to advancing fisheries science and conserving fisheries resources. Bartholomew was recognized for her outstanding contributions to the field, particularly in deepening our understanding of how infectious organisms drive disease in salmonids and other freshwater fish, and in developing risk assessments and predictive models to inform management of salmonid fisheries.
In 2016, she was awarded the American Fisheries Society S.F Snieszko Distinguished Service Award for her outstanding accomplishments in the field of aquatic animal health. This lifetime achievement award is the highest honor presented by the Fish Health Section of the AFS.
An OSU alumna with both her master’s degree and Ph.D. in fisheries science, Bartholomew joined the Department of Microbiology faculty 26 years ago and has a joint appointment in the College of Agricultural Sciences. Bartholomew’s decades of publications and funded research have focused on the endemic (and often fatal) wild Pacific salmon myxozoan parasite Ceratomyxa shasta.
Her directorship of the J.L. Fryer Aquatic Animal Health Laboratory at OSU has deepened our understanding of how infectious organisms sicken salmonids and other freshwater fish, and produced forecasting models of how climate change might affect the interaction. Her research has advanced the microbiological understanding of the host-pathogen dynamic as well as produced practical recommendations for salmon fisheries that have already been put into good use.
Bartholomew also teaches Advances in Disease Ecology, Fish Diseases in Conservation Biology and Aquaculture, and offers a semi-annual Salmonid Disease Workshop for state and federal fishery biologists.
