Larkin faculty member is an advocate for animal-free testing

The Physicians Committee of Medicine (http://www.pcrm.org/about/about/about-pcrm), a non-profit organization with headquarters in Washington, D.C. and which has as one of its priorities to shift research from animal models to human-relevant studies, recently (April 20^th, 2018) interviewed one of our faculty from the College of Biomedical Sciences, Dr. Félix E. Rivera-Mariani. Because Dr. Rivera-Mariani was an awardee, in 2012, of the Lush Young Researcher Award (https://lushprize.org/past-years/2012-prize/lush-prize-winners-2012/young-researcher-prize-winners-2012/) granted by the Ethical Consumer Association (http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/) (London, UK) for his efforts in expanding existing human-based immunological approaches as an alternative to animal-free testing. For this reason, the Physicians Committee of Medicine, as part of the Young Scientists Project, approached Dr. Rivera-Mariani to provide his view on the following: 1) what lead Dr. Rivera-Mariani to conduct research without the use of animals, 2) challenges he has faced with the decision to not use animals in his research, and 3) advice on how best connect to and support young scientists that want to pursue non-animal research.