IHAC’s 2025 Year in Review

Message from IHAC’s Executive Director, Dr. Kevin Morris

While 2025 was a challenging year for academic research focused on health for individuals and communities, IHAC has continued to be a leading education and research organization focused on how human-animal-environment interactions affect individual and community health. Our social work values have provided a guiding framework that drives the institute’s resilience. We’re presenting a few highlights from this year as we look toward to 2026 in which we’ll be celebrating IHAC’s 20th anniversary. We invite you to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn so you can keep track of the many opportunities to connect with our team and some special events we’ll be holding as part of our anniversary celebration. I also invite you to support us through a tax-deductible donation to our education scholarships or research program. All of us at IHAC wish you a great 2026!

IHAC Education

Our educational programs, known collectively as IHACPro, continue to be a success around the world. To date, we have served 1,396 students from 34 countries across six continents in our courses and certificates. In 2025 alone, we worked with 138 students across 25 courses throughout our certificates and individual offerings. Our alumni represent a variety of human service professionals integrating human-animal interactions into their work. We also continued our support for the Graduate School of Social Work’s Human-Animal-Environment Interactions in Social Work certificate and want to extend our congratulations to the 2025 graduates!

This year, we were also able to provide over $10,500 in scholarships for students who would otherwise be unable to take our programs. Thanks to an individual donor, we provided one scholarship for two of our Equine Behavior courses. We were also excited to receive a grant from The Human-Animal Alliance which allowed us to offer five, $2,000 scholarships to prospective students in our Animals and Human Health certificate. As we continue to develop more programs and fundraise, we hope to provide more scholarship opportunities in the future!

Our education team also worked diligently to keep current course content up to date, as well as create new offerings we hope to roll-out in 2026, including a new course available in January! The Human Engagement in Animal Welfare Orientation course will be available to the public soon and is the first course in a bucket of IHAC courses centering human engagement in animal welfare settings. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we plan on releasing more new offerings, hosting educational webinars, and updating our curriculum in the Canine-Assisted Intervention Specialist certificate.

IHAC Research

The IHAC research team had another year of major milestones and contributions to understanding how our interactions with other animals affect individual and community health and well-being.

Our Human-Animal Interactions and Mental Health portfolio includes studies with youth and military veterans with PTSD. Over the last year, our research program with Green Chimneys generated a publication proposing a theory of how youth relationships with animals may act as influential assets of their developmental trajectories. We also focused on translating the research on their nature-based interventions into practice, including an update of the comprehensive documentation of their animal-assisted programs for youth. We’re looking forward to having members of the Green Chimneys team for our Winter Quarter IHAC Research Seminar in February. We also published a widely read article on how pet dogs mediate stress responses in The Conversation and another that captures what we learned about including pet dogs in the laboratory study that article describes. After spending all of 2025 collecting data for our service dogs for veterans with PTSD study, we will be conducting an initial pilot study of the first 10 veterans and their dogs in early 2026. Stay tuned for our first reports of the biology underlying the human-animal bond in this important context!

Our Human-Animal Interactions and Equity portfolio includes studies on access to veterinary care, animal law enforcement, and animal sheltering. Our support of PetSmart Charities’ Incubator Grants program will be highlighted in our Spring Quarter IHAC Research Seminar which is an event you can attend in-person or virtually at no cost. In early 2026, look for our publication of the results of our analysis of over one million animal control cases, which we presented at the Humane World for Animals’ Animal Care Expo in Las Vegas, NV and the ISAZ Conference in Saskatoon, Canada. We will also be presenting the results of our study on the community effects of open adoption policies at the Humane World for Animals’ Animal Care Expo in April.

Looking Forward to 2026 - IHAC’s 20th Anniversary!

As well as continuing our education and research agendas in the new year, we are looking forward to hosting more events and celebrating 20 years of IHAC. In addition to our research seminar series and our practitioner webinar series, we will be co-hosting the Human-Animal Interaction Conference at Green Chimneys this April (rescheduled from April 2025). This year’s theme is “People, Animals and Nature: The Restorative Power of Relationship.” Early bird pricing is available now through January 14!

On behalf of all of us at IHAC, thank you so much to all our followers for your support in 2025. We have accomplished a great deal this year and are looking forward to an even greater 2026 as we celebrate 20 years of the Institute for Human-Animal Connection!