Tufts[Cummings School] allows students to be creative and tap into their passions in veterinary medicine. In addition to the wonderfulness of caring for large and small animals in a traditional sense, we also get to participate in public health, do research, make discoveries, and start companies.
Research Helping Naval Dolphins Led by Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson, V99 Uncovers a New Essential Fatty Acid
Dr. Venn-Watson’s upcoming book The Longevity Nutrient expounds on the prolific health benefits of C15:0
Early along her path into the field of epidemiology, Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson, V99 planned on medical school, until she met a veterinary epidemiologist.
“His advice changed my life forever. He told me that if I wanted to understand diseases, I needed to learn what diseases do in multiple species. If I understood that, I would understand how diseases work. That’s the best advice I’ve ever received,” she recalls.
Venn-Watson started shopping veterinary schools after earning her BS in animal physiology and neuroscience at the University of California San Diego and quickly landed on Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.
“Tufts [Cummings School] was the only school that understood immediately the relevance of a person wanting to become an epidemiologist going to veterinary school—and they were excited about it,” says Venn-Watson. “At Tufts [Cummings School], it’s about global health and helping all animals, including humans. I was so impressed how they got that quirky interest I had, completely understood it, and embraced it.”
While at Cummings School, Venn-Watson co-founded her first of several organizations over her career, Gap Junction, a STEM program for middle schoolers that is still going strong today, nearly 30 years later. She’s grateful to the Cummings School administration for their longstanding support of the program and to the faculty and students who continued to expand Gap Junction, now open to more than 100 students a year in three local communities.
The internship opportunities at Cummings School allowed Venn-Watson to gain real world experience in public health and epidemiology—and paved her career path. She interned and later moved into the role of executive secretary at the American Association of Food Safety & Public Health Veterinarians, combing through records of listeria outbreaks and publishing a paper assessing risks to the food supply.
Venn-Watson also interned and worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a few capacities. As project director of the World Health Organization’s Global Salmonella Surveillance Program, she helped to establish surveillance systems throughout the world. She also researched best practices to limit the incidence of salmonellosis spread from reptiles to humans. Alongside her colleagues, they worked to institute hand-washing guidelines at pet stores and zoos, which prompted zoos across the country to install hand-washing stations by reptile exhibits.
In a similar vein, Venn-Watson connected with a veterinarian in San Francisco working with people diagnosed with AIDS or HIV, who were not only losing physical contact with others but also advised by their doctors to part with pets to avoid contracting diseases.
“The importance of the human-animal bond to our mental health and wellness was not being appreciated at the time, but we also did not want to put a population at unnecessary risk,” says Venn-Watson. “We worked through the science.”
Together, they founded Healthy Pets, Healthy People, an organization within the CDC that offers guidelines to physicians and pet owners on preventing disease spread from animals to people. Their research findings were published in JAVMA.
Venn-Watson appreciated the diversity of training she received at Cummings School. “Tufts[Cummings School] allows students to be creative and tap into their passions in veterinary medicine. In addition to the wonderfulness of caring for large and small animals in a traditional sense, we also get to participate in public health, do research, make discoveries, and start companies.”
After graduating from Cummings School, Venn-Watson was hired on by the CDC as executive secretary of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), concurrently earning her Master of Public Health at Emory University. Impressed by her work at the CDC, the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center sponsored Venn-Watson as a National Research Council associate to understand how to best protect Navy dolphins from infectious diseases. The associateship, in turn, led the United States Navy’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to recruit Venn-Watson as a Technical Agent, all while she continued studies to protect the health of U.S. Navy dolphins in San Diego.
The Navy’s bottlenose dolphins safely detect and tag underwater mines around the world and locate enemy swimmers in protected areas. In addition to keeping the Navy dolphins healthy, Venn-Watson spearheaded investigations into mass wild dolphin strandings caused by infectious disease, as well as the impact on wild dolphins from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The lifespan of Navy dolphins is typically 20 years longer than dolphins in the wild. Navy dolphins living into their forties and fifties started developing aging-related conditions seen in humans.
“It’s a healthy, thriving population of Naval dolphins, and as they’re getting older, we now had this geriatric dolphin population,” says Venn-Watson. “The focus shifted from the Navy protecting dolphins against infectious disease to studying how to protect them against chronic aging-associated diseases.”
Transitioning into a new role as the translational medicine and research program director for the Navy’s National Marine Mammal Foundation, Venn-Watson, and her team published more than two dozen papers documenting the dolphins’ chronic aging conditions, including high cholesterol, arthritis, fatty liver disease, and brain changes consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.
The team analyzed the dolphins’ blood samples taken throughout their lives to identify molecules present in the healthiest dolphins. One of the top nutrients was the molecule C15:0, a saturated fatty acid (pentadecanoic acid). In the human diet, C15:0 is present in dairy fat—whole milk, butter, and cheeses.
The team found that when they fed dolphins with chronic diseases diets higher in C15:0 (fatty fish), they became healthier. Further research supported their findings that C15:0 lowers risk and can actually reverse many chronic diseases, making it an essential fatty acid, a nutrient that the body does not produce but is essential to health.
To put the significance of this discovery in perspective, the last essential fatty acid to be identified was Omega-3 in 1929. The Naval team continued researching C15:0 extensively and published a series of studies to confirm that the nutrient is not only beneficial, but met the rare criteria of an essential fatty acid that improves human health and lifespan.
“Not all saturated fats are created equal,” says Venn-Watson. “C15:0 is a Goldilocks saturated fat that is anti-inflammatory and strengthens cells.”
Studies from experts around the world supported the teams’ findings and further revealed that low C15:0 levels lead to accelerated aging, C15:0 helps in babies’ body growth and brain development, and that humans with high C15:0 levels have lower risk of certain types of cancers, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and fatty liver disease.
The Naval research team developed a pure powder C15:0 ingredient to address nutritional deficiencies. To continue research and development into a pure C15:0 ingredient, Venn-Watson co-founded Epitracker® Inc. and sister company Seraphina Therapeutics, licensing the Navy’s technology to produce a C15:0 supplement called fatty15. The supplement has since won many awards, including Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas and Newsweek’s Readers’ Choice Award. Venn-Watson has also been honored with the Department of Human and Health Services Secretary’s Award for Innovations in Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and as an Albert Schweitzer Fellow for Life. Recently, she was named a 2025 CNBC Changemaker. She has more than 80 scientific publications and more than 60 patents behind her work.
Venn-Watson’s upcoming book, The Longevity Nutrient: The Unexpected Fat that Holds the Key to Healthy Aging, comes out March 25 from Simon & Schuster.
“The book is told like a nerdy detective story, this unexpected discovery and gift that the dolphins gave us and where the science led us,” says Venn-Watson. “We need to leverage C15:0 to fix nutritional deficiencies and the rise we’re seeing in fatty liver disease and cancers. We all have a purpose, and the gift of C15:0 is that it is intended to help us live longer and live healthier to fulfill our purpose.”
At this point along Venn-Watson’s career path, her purpose is clear to her—to raise awareness of the health benefits of this newly discovered nutrient and get C15:0 back into people’s diets.
“Tufts [Cummings School] played a meaningful part in enabling this story to happen,” says Venn-Watson. “They did it by being open to an applicant and, in a heartbeat, saying, ‘Yes, you should be here with us.’ Veterinary medicine understands that by not looking at just one species but many, we can help all species. I’m so grateful for all the support Tufts provided during those critical years.”