Zoo Veterinarian - Dr. Albert Lewandowski
Steffee Center for Zoological Medicine

What do you want to be when you grow up? You've probably heard many children quickly respond, "veterinarian!" or maybe you once considered it yourself. There aren't many people who get to live out their childhood dreams, but one of the lucky ones is right here at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo - Dr. Albert Lewandowski. "Doc" Lewandowski had settled on his career path by the time he was in fourth grade. He achieved that dream the old-fashioned way, by getting his foot in the door and working his way up.

Doc started his Zoo career as a sixteen-year old Benedictine High School student working as a ticket taker. He took his job seriously - so seriously that, when he didn't recognize the Zoo's director, veterinarian Dr. Leonard Goss, Doc stopped him from entering the Zoo at the front gate. Rather than become annoyed, Dr. Goss said "son, you're doing a good job. Keep it up."

Doc finished out the summer renting strollers and returned the following summer to work at the Children's Farm, now the site of Australian Adventure. "It was a wonderful training ground. You learned how animals behave," says Doc. He worked at the Children's Farm through his undergraduate years at Ohio State University. When it came time to apply to OSU's veterinary medicine school, a good word from Dr. Goss didn't hurt his chances for acceptance in a program statistically more difficult to enter than medical school.

Since 1989, Doc has been the Zoo's full-time veterinarian after stints at the Philadelphia Zoo and the Detroit Zoo. "People don't realize that this is a huge zoo - the biggest in the area," says Doc. Thousands of animals from more than six-hundred species means plenty of challenges for Doc and Dr. Christopher Bonar, the zoo's associate veterinarian who joined the staff in 1994. And sometimes, the challenges are huge. When the Zoo's 1390-pound Kodiak bear needed medical attention, twenty-two people helped move him to the examination area.

Zoo vets do much more than make "animal house calls." They play an increasingly important role in research, too. Doc started a "frozen zoo" where 16,000 blood serum and biopsy samples are banked for study. Dr. Bonar is now using those samples in a research project with the National Cancer Institute. Did you know that tigers are prone to breast cancer or that bears are frequent victims of liver and gall bladder cancer? Blood samples are also collected and analyzed for rhino and elephant reproductive studies. In fact, hundreds of samples are added to the "frozen zoo" each year.

When a cardiologist from the Cleveland Clinic visited the Zoo's vet hospital to observe a procedure, he asked, "who does the anesthesia? Who's the radiologist? Who's performing the operation?" "That's me," answered Doc. Even though he's required to play multiple medical roles on 600 animal species, he's never regretted his choice of career. Doc has worked hard to earn the privilege of joining a very select group of only 150 full-time zoo vets in the U.S. And he hasn't had to fall back on his childhood second-choice career: farmer.