Sandra Newbury didn't set out to become a major figure in the world of animal shelters.

While living in Chicago working as an artist for 12 years, a fascination with helping stray neighborhood cats got her foot in the door with animal shelters.

After volunteering and working in shelters, Newbury attended the veterinary school at UW-Madison. She saw great need and wanted to make an impact on the well-being of shelters and their animals.

Newbury went on to help found the shelter medicine program at the University of California-Davis, while working remotely from her home in Madison.

She travels nationally and internationally improving animal shelters. In 2014, Newbury started the shelter medicine program, serving as the director of the program at UW-Madison's veterinary school.

While UW-Madison didn't have a formal shelter program until 2014, the school was likely teaching shelter medicine courses before anyone else, she said.

In May, Newbury was named one of 15 national winners of the Maddie's Fund's Maddie Hero Award. The award gives $10,000 grants to each winner's organization for their efforts to advance a no-kill mission in shelters.

A pioneer in shelter medicine, which only recently became a board-certified specialty, Newbury said she is one of about 10 board-certified shelter medicine practitioners.

"If you look at veterinary medicine and the number of animals that need help or assistance that end up in shelters, there is no other disease, there is no other thing that affects more animals than animal shelters or animal care," she said. "No cancer kills as many animals."

What is shelter medicine?

Shelter medicine is working with animal shelters they are kind of our patients instead of just an individual animal. Though, a lot of the time, we do work with individual animals. We look at the whole organization as our partner and our patients. We work with animal shelters to increase their lifesaving capacity. Our goal is to help shelters save more lives.

We work with them on infectious disease, sanitation, even the way they do adoptions, the way they do intake and we do work in the community to support lifesaving instead of having animals pouring into shelters.

Do you work with the Dane County Humane Society as a branch of your work at UW-Madison?

A long time ago I was the director of medical services (at DCHS) which is really nice. (DCHS) is our field shelter for the UW-Madison shelter medicine program. Our interns work here, our residents do other clinical work here... I consult with (the shelter) on a regular basis. I'm pretty involved in a lot of the decisions that are made. If we really want to try something that would be a great new idea we try it here (at DCHS) first. This shelter is a really nice example of how a shelter can be run.

How has shelter medicine changed the landscape for animal shelters?

Before I went to vet school, when I would work in shelters, vets would come to shelters to help, but they didn't understand how shelters worked.... Coming out of vet school I came back to shelters with a whole new perspective.... A lot of shelters didn't used to vaccinate when animals came in... now we've done enough research to see how incredibly important it is to vaccinate an animal as it comes through the door. Now we can do the outreach and education to show shelters that. We've worked on a document called the Guidelines for Standards of Care in Animal Shelters. A lot of people running shelters didn't know what the right things to do were.... Our goal is to get that information out to veterinarians and non-veterinarians. Sometimes shelters have vets, but sometimes they don't have vets. Sometimes we have to educate the board of directors or the shelter director so they understand the health implications of the decisions they are making.

Do you think because of shelter medicine shelters are becoming stronger, better places for animals to be?

Oh yeah I'd like to believe a lot of that comes from shelter medicine. Even in the standards of care we wrote we were clear that we didn't expect every shelter to go from where they are to getting all of this achieved, but what we want is for every shelter to go from where they are to a little bit better. If they are always doing that then everything is getting better and animals' lives are being saved.

Interview by Amanda Finn

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Know Your Madisonian: Veterinarian is pioneer in shelter medicine - Madison.com