Dr. Josh Daniels wins national award for diagnostic excellence

Dr. Josh Daniels, associate professor in the CSU Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology (MIP), won the 2025 American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians (AAVLD) Award for Excellence in Diagnostic Veterinary Microbiology.

Presented at the recent AAVLD annual meeting, the award goes to a mid- to late-career veterinary diagnostic microbiologist who has made contributions to the discipline and actively participated on AAVLD committees and subcommittees. Daniels served as co-chair of the AAVLD Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing Subcommittee from 2018 to 2021, and co-chaired the Bacteriology Steering Committee from 2021 to 2024.

At CSU, he is the bacteriology and mycology section head in the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratories, associate department head of D.V.M. and service for MIP, and microbiology veterinary residency coordinator.

“Josh is known as one of the leading veterinary bacteriologists in the United States,” said Dr. Kristy Pabilonia, executive director of the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratories for the CSU Veterinary Health System. “He has great passion for providing exceptional diagnostic results to our clients and sharing his knowledge with others. His efforts bring great recognition to our laboratory and we’re lucky to have him!”

His work across the college exemplifies the interconnectedness of the CSU Veterinary Health System.

“I’m one of these people who wears a lot of hats,” Daniels said. We spoke with him about his award and the meaning of his work:

Tell me about the award.

This award is focused on people who do diagnostic service. Most of my job is service, being the head of the bacteriology and mycology section in the VDL. It’s one of the parts of the laboratory that performs testing on samples sent in from veterinarians, including our own hospitals, with those samples being representative of sites that are thought to be infected with a bacterial agent, or doing blood testing for the presence of antibodies directed against certain bacterial and fungal infectious agents.

So to break it down even more simply, you get a sample and you look at it and you figure out what’s wrong with the host?

Well, not necessarily. We’re a piece of the puzzle. Most laboratory testing shouldn’t be considered in a vacuum and it has to be contextualized with what is being seen clinically in the animal and with the animal’s history. So we’re providing some puzzle pieces for the veterinarian to put together a diagnosis.

Medicine is so fascinating. It’s a science, but it’s an art too.

It’s an art, yes. And our section, bacteriology, has certain elements that lend itself to being considered as a bit of an art because we are in the business of reading cultures, seeing what bacteria are growing on Petri dishes and trying to figure out which ones of those are important in the case at hand. It’s kind of like gardening but without knowing exactly what seeds are being planted until the plants grow.

So you’re not looking at just one thing?

Right, there could be multiple bacteria and we have to take into account what the species and body site were and how the veterinarian sampled them and what we think we’re looking for. It’s a lot of pattern recognition, picking through that to look for what could be significant. Often, it’s very straightforward. Sometimes we do just grow one thing, but we also get a lot of frankly dirty samples and we’re trying to find things in that mix of microorganisms that may be important. Unfortunately, we sometimes have to tell a submitter that they submitted a contaminated sample that yields no interpretable information.

You got your D.V.M. at University of Wisconsin-Madison and practiced for a few years, how did you become interested in laboratory work?

After I was a practicing veterinarian, I decided to go back for a Ph.D. at Washington State, and I was really interested in pharmacology of antibiotics. I wound up doing my Ph.D. not in pharmacology of antibiotics, but in epidemiology of antimicrobial resistance. But mechanistically that relates to a lot of the pharmacology, so that was a natural dovetail with the diagnostics piece being bacteriology as opposed to virology.

So you chose bacteria over viruses?

I was trained in virology and immunology in my residency (at the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory), but bacteriology was always kind of home to me, and it’s the most interesting to me, because we grow stuff very often that we’ve not seen before. Still, given even the tens of thousands of samples that we receive every year, we see the same things over and over again, but there’s always something new every few weeks.

Do you mean never seen before in the history of the world or new in this lab?

Sometimes it’s an incidental finding, just a weird bacterium that we haven’t seen before. So it’s interesting on a few levels. It could be interesting in terms of perhaps being the causative agent or an associated agent with the problem in the animal. But also, since we’re getting samples from animals, there’s just a lot of stuff that’s not been well described out there in terms of what will necessarily be cultivated from a given animal and body site.

It’s amazing how much we still don’t know about the microbial world.

The microbial world is so big that there’s so much that people have maybe seen, but not written down. So we’re seeing something and thinking it’s a novel observation and it’s exciting to us. It’s all happening on the head of a pin, essentially. There are tons and they’re running the whole show, really.

It must be cool to work in a field where there’s still so much potential to learn and grow.

Yes, it’s just very interesting. This is a cool place to be in terms of technology with the ability to sequence DNA very inexpensively and easily. It has opened up a way to ask questions about infectious disease that we never even thought we’d be able to ask because we can get so much genetic data so quickly.

It’s endless, and that’s just the microbiology part of it. I’m actually just as involved now with curriculum as I am with doing clinical microbiology. I just love working in a vet school!