UCF Biology Faculty Inspires Future Veterinarians
Frank Logiudice has dedicated three decades of teaching to helping pre-vet students
By: Emily Dougherty | October 30, 2024
Frank Logiudice with his students, who surprised him by all wearing Hawaiian shirts on the last day of class.
Higher education can have a lasting mark on a student’s life, and faculty along the way can play a major part.
Frank Logiudice, a Senior Instructor in the Department of Biology and pre-vet advisor, has made an impact working with UCF students over the past 30 years. He shares about his unexpected career path.
“Originally, I didn’t want to be a teacher. When I went to college, I was pre-med and had no interest in being one, partially because my parents were both teachers,” Logiudice says. “We didn’t have a great relationship, so you can imagine as a teenager I was looking for a different field.”
He shared that during his pre-med journey, he took an opportunity that ended up shaping his future.
“I was persuaded to take an undergraduate teaching position for an introductory zoology lab,” Logiudice says. “I found I really enjoyed teaching, and it also made me a better student because I learned constantly. Then I realized my desire to teach at a university level.”
Logiudice says when he first came to UCF to pursue his graduate degree, he taught an undergraduate course since it coincided with his own research.
“I came here in 1986 to better understand the way sting rays view the world by studying retinas, and it overlapped with anatomy quite a bit; so I ended up teaching anatomy,” Logiudice says.
As his career progressed, he took up a number of advising roles to students who were pursuing health professions, serving as the pre-med advisor for the American Medical Student Association as well as the American Student Dental Association.
While advising, he noticed that pre-vet students often lacked similar support.
He shares a story about a veterinarian he knows who had to travel just to get advice.
“I believe the veterinarian went to school in South Dakota at the time, and he had to travel over state lines to Nevada just to get advising help,” Logiudice says.
As an anatomy professor, Logiudice felt he had the resources and understanding to help veterinary students and offered his support to pre-vet students whenever asked. Over the course of three decades, most pre-vet students have considered him as an advisor in their course of study. His remarkable commitment to student success has not gone unnoticed, as his past students stay in contact with him.
“Fast forward years later, I’m Facebook friends with one of my original pre-vet club students and she ended up going to veterinary school and working with one of my friends from college,” Logiudice says. “She now specializes in cardiac medicine for dogs.”
He explains why veterinary medicine is important and its significance on society for both humans and animals.
“There’s a lot of different ways we can look at it; we want to provide good quality healthcare for animals. People consider pets as family members and want great medical treatment for their pets,” Loguidice says.
He says outside of people’s family, veterinary medicine plays a big role in our country and should not be overlooked.
“It’s also important because healthy animals are a part of agriculture,” he says. “Unfortunately, there aren’t enough people pursuing this field. The gap is so wide that the federal government provides scholarships for agricultural veterinary medicine.”
Logiudice has dedicated three decades of his career to student success and continues to want the best for his students to succeed both in and out of the classroom.
“We’re supposed to pave the way for the next generation, and we can and should help them through a willingness to help them to succeed,” he says.