Dr. Terri Bright is the Director of the Behavior Department at MSPCA-Angell, where she oversees a robust training program and has a clinical dog and cat behavior practice. Her family is from Tennessee, and she was raised all over the world as a military dependent.

Dr. Bright got her Master’s and Ph. D. in Applied Behavior Analysis at Simmons College, and her B.S. in Intercultural Communications at Lesley University; she is also a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Animals and Public Policy at the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.  Her Master’s research entailed finding whether humans exhibiting canid cutoff signals changed Shelter dogs’ behavior, and her doctoral research was on developing a functional behavior assessment of dog behavior.

She created “Safewalk,” a method of training animal shelter volunteers to safely interact with and train dogs, which increased the adoptability of pit bulls in a shelter from 77% to as high as 98%.