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Cynthia is Professor Emeritus retired from the Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2021.  She has been an investigator in the area of cellular immunology since pursuing her PhD at Cornell University in 1983 on bovine brucellosis.  Her research has focused on cellular responses to bacterial and protozoan pathogens of ruminants, primarily cattle, including to Brucella, Leptospira, Mycobacterium and Theileria.  During her university career she was the principal investigator on many federally-funded grants, training more than 25 PhD and MSc students. A particular focus of her work was the use of large animal models to investigate the biology of γδ T cells and their role in promoting immune efficacy of vaccines. She was active in the American Association of Immunologists, serving on the publication committee after acting as a section editor for the Journal of Immunology and was an editor for Veterinary Immunology and Immunopathology for many years. She has been a consultant for USAID since 2009 when she served as a Jefferson Science Fellow at the US State Department, advising on control of infectious diseases that affect availability of animal source food in Sub-Saharan Africa. She is currently an advisor for ArkeaBio, STAR-IDAZ which coordinates animal health research globally and the technical committee of the $30 million Brucella Prize administered through GalvMed.