Gabriella “Gabi” Hernandez grew up riding horses in Chino Hills, California. When not in school, Hernandez spent her time at the Silver Rose Ranch, where she boarded her horse, gave riding lessons and helped teach at the ranch’s summer camps. From an early age, Hernandez planned to be a large-animal veterinarian. Upon the advice of an alumna from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, she met at the ranch, Hernandez applied to and was accepted into Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. During her sophomore year, she started working at the Cal Poly feed mill, where she mixed food rations for the farm animals, drove forklifts, moved and stacked 50-pound feedbags and learned about food safety and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points, a systematic approach to the identification, evaluation and control of food safety hazards. She participated in research studies and was responsible for adding supplements to feed. These studies required careful weighing, dosing and recordkeeping, which fit well with her detail-oriented personality, and she loved the challenge of the research and its additional responsibilities.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s animal science curriculum requires students to take a variety of classes, including enterprise classes, which allow students to discover the breadth of careers beyond veterinarian medicine. Enterprise classes are “learn by doing” educational experiences. In an enterprise class Hernandez affectionately called “Swine 101” (formally “Animal Science 290— Swine Management”), she learned just about everything about swine by raising her own pigs.
Swine 101 and Hernandez’s job at the feed mill converged during her junior year, when she took an advanced animal science nutrition class. The professor, Dr. Rodrigo Manjarin, assigned reading assignments from science journals and asked students to submit written responses that included analyses and discussions of the research methods and conclusions described in the papers. Dr. Manjarin liked Hernandez’s writing and critical thinking skills and suggested that she consider a career in research. He also suggested a research internship with Dr. Lindsey Hulbert at Kansas State University through Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). Dr. Hulbert’s research centered on the development and validation of automated technologies to monitor health and welfare of domestic animals. Hernandez learned a lot about animal behavior, particularly pig behavior, but concluded this area of research was not going to be her career. Being far from home and school was both challenging and rewarding. She felt out of her comfort zone, without friends and family, but she said it helped her mature. She highly recommends an away-from-home research experience to her fellow students.
During Hernandez’s senior year, Manjarin asked her to stay at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to pursue a master’s degree. Her research project, co-funded by the CSU Agricultural Research Institute, examined the effect of probiotics in protecting early weaning pigs from nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
During pig production, newborn pigs may be weaned early to increase sow productivity. To increase their appetite, piglets are given sweeteners, which can cause an imbalance of their gut microbiota that results in diarrhea. Probiotics may help protect against the diarrhea and result in better piglet health and growth. Manjarin’s research team hypothesized that the high sugar diets of the weaned piglets might lead them to develop a pattern of liver injury resembling pediatric NAFLD, and studying the effects of these diets in Iberian pigs may lead to insights into this disease in humans. Hernandez ran the Iberian Pig Enterprise, overseeing a team of undergraduates to feed the pigs every six hours for 10 weeks and weigh the pigs every three days. Their research found that neonatal Iberian pigs fed a high-fat, high-fructose diet developed a pattern of liver injury resembling pediatric NAFLD, confirming that these animals could be used as a translational model to understand the disease in humans. The second part of Hernandez’s study was to determine whether a mixture of probiotics added to the pigs’ feed would prevent the disease. The team found that probiotics did not prevent NAFLD from developing in pigs nor did it ameliorate its severity.
Hernandez completed her master’s degree in summer 2019. Through her academic career at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, she learned that she enjoyed managing people and had good interpersonal skills. She is now working as a research assistant at JustFoodForDogs, a Southern California company that offers fresh whole food pet food. Hernandez helps conduct research and testing of their products to ensure their claims are backed by data. She also is part of a custom formulation team, where she helps owners understand the nutritional needs of their pets and to find the best diet that addresses the pet’s health needs. Hernandez said she is definitely using what she learned through her master’s degree program, and enjoys her job. Her goal upon graduation was to find a job in clinical and life science where she could combine her science knowledge with her desire to communicate science to nonscientists, specifically in industries where expert knowledge is needed to help develop or market products. This job is a promising start to fulfilling that goal.