Keely L. Szilagyi, DVM, MPH

Bio

Dr. Szilágyi is a laboratory animal veterinarian who serves the biomedical research programs at IUSM and IUI-School of Science by providing laboratory animal care, management, research, and regulatory support. She currently holds appointments as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, as well as LARC Assistant Director and SARC Clinical Veterinarian. Prior to these appointments and after earning a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) degree with honors from the University of Illinois (2011), she completed a three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in Laboratory Animal Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in conjunction with six months as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs, Chicago, IL. She also earned a master’s in public health (MPH), epidemiology, from UIC, and collaborated with faculty in multiple departments on her master’s capstone and publications (Szilágyi et al., 2013, Zhang et al., 2015, Szilágyi et al., 2017), utilizing a competitive awarded grant (2013) and resulting in two awards (2014). She joined IUSM in 2015 and earned her Diplomate of the American College of Laboratory Animal Medicine (DACLAM) certification in 2017.

Service Interests/Expertise

Expert services that Dr. Szilágyi provides within and outside IUSM include immunocompromised rodent health and husbandry management including clinical monitoring and case work-up and if needed opportunistic agent eradication (example agents found and eradicated include the bacterium Klebsiella oxytoca and Corynebacterium bovis, of which she researched and presented at national meetings in 2017 and 2020, respectively), rodent health surveillance and monitoring program refinement implementation and guidance and if needed infectious disease eradication (example parasite detected and eradicated includes fur mites in two separate facilities), animal model refinement support (two examples resulted in publications, Szilágyi et al., 2018, De Luca et al., 2018), and quantitative data metrics/statistical analysis (example recent publication Szilágyi et al., 2025). Additionally, in 2019, Dr. Szilágyi directed the assembly of a centralized hypoxia chamber space to simplify resources for mutliple labs with murine research models requiring low oxygen levels. In 2021 she directed the formation of a gnotobiotic facility for research requiring germ-free and gnotobiotic mice for the Schmidt Lab; and initiated flexible film isolators for germ-free mice in 2023, and continued gnotobiotic work, with the Needham Lab.

Within the university, Dr. Szilágyi serves as an appointed committee member on regulatory boards including the IUSM Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), IU Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), and IUI School of Science IACUC. Nationally, she has served as vice chair and chair of the ACLAM New Diplomate Welcoming Committee, as well as a task force member and is the current vice chair of the ACLAM Workforce and Demographic Committee (WDC) where she is coordinating collaboration with the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) to streamline the WDC biennial surveys of laboratory animal veterinarians and provide a path for consistent survey results to the field. Dr. Szilágyi implemented the survey with committee input, analyzed data, and presented the findings of the past two WDC biennial surveys at national meetings (2022, 2023) in addition to providing written reports for ASLAP (American Society for Laboratory Animal Practitioners) and ACLAM members. She also serves as a veterinary reviewer for international journals Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) and Comparative Medicine/JAALAS.

Teaching Interests/Expertise

Dr. Szilágyi teaches in a variety of settings, and audiences include research and laboratory care personnel, undergraduate and graduate students, high school students, and fellow laboratory animal veterinarians. Annually, she provides a lecture in a graduate-level course on improving reproducibility by accounting for murine biological variables that can confound research outcomes, a topic for which she co-authored a book chapter (Szilágyi et al., 2021). She has produced multiple LARC online training courses for on-demand learning for many people, that are required for access to the facilities. Additionally, she teaches small group in-person training classes that require hands-on training for both personnel/animal safety and task-assessment and retention, such as hypoxia chamber room, gnotobiotic, and murine surgical procedure training. Dr. Szilágyi participates in bi-weekly journal club meetings with Indiana laboratory animal veterinarians where recent journal articles and contemporary topics are presented and examined. She is also a course lecturer and mentor for the Indiana Collaborative Training Program for Comparative Medicine, an ACLAM recognized laboratory animal medicine training program.