Tracy Heenan has been the director of the Office of Animal Care and Use for 30 years.
In 1994, Tracy Heenan was an associate at a small animal veterinary practice when she heard about a newly created position at UNC-Chapel Hill that piqued her interest. At the time, the number of Carolina’s research initiatives involving animals was small, and the care and use programs had been established for only a few years.
Since then, Heenan, who is also a professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine within the School of Medicine, has been instrumental in growing OVCR’s Office of Animal Care and Use (OACU), the managing office of the University’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
UNC Research spoke to Heenan about the evolution of OACU and what researchers should know about the resources available to them.
How has your position changed over the years?
It was a totally different world back when I started. It was just me — I was the office. Since then, we’ve added training programs and grown our staff to include 10 full-time positions. As the overall animal program at UNC-Chapel Hill has grown, so has our office.
I’ve had the great fortune of working with wonderful supervisors who were flexible and gave me full responsibility for making changes or adding to our program. Some additions were necessary due to external regulations for animal care and use and the compliance areas that have developed. I have also had the benefit of working with capable and engaged OACU employees who have been instrumental in shaping the program.
What accomplishment are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of starting the laboratory animal coordinator program. It is unique to Carolina, and other institutions across the country have modeled their programs after it.
I thought it was important to develop a robust hands-on training program for researchers working with animals, so in 1998 I started an initiative and hired my first training and compliance coordinator to provide this training. It then became a UNC-Chapel Hill requirement that every researcher who would touch or work with animals had to attend formal training classes and be certified.
In conjunction with this requirement, we developed the laboratory animal coordinator program. Every investigator laboratory that works with animals is required to have a coordinator who receives didactic animal-use training from my office and gets a certification of their proficiency. They are then allowed to train other lab members and serve as a liaison for the IACUC, OACU, and the investigator laboratory.
How does your office work with the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)?
OACU supports IACUC in its regulation and compliance efforts. While IACUC is the overall authority on animal care and use at the University, the committee requires help with the day-to-day logistics of ensuring that all federal policies, accreditation standards, and institutional requirements are being met. This includes working closely with the Division of Comparative Medicine, which manages the day-to-day care and medical treatment for animals, and Environment, Health, and Safety, which is responsible for managing the safety of employees working with animals.
Every six months, we help inspect all animal housing facilities, including investigator labs where animal work is conducted and procedure locations. In addition, my office has three main operational units to support the work of the IACUC: education and oversight, protocol administration, and grant congruency.
What do you want researchers to know about your office?
Investigators have a huge amount of administrative burden. In many respects, the IACUC requirements can feel like a lot. We understand that, and we want researchers to know that although we are a compliance office, we don’t want to represent a roadblock or burden. We want to be helpful, answer questions, facilitate research, and help investigators succeed.