Dr. Sally Dickinson & Dr. Erica FeuerbacherÂ
Dr. Sally Dickinson
Sally has dedicated her life to training, handling, and coaching search-and-rescue (SAR) dog teams worldwide. Alongside her 20-year career as a firefighter/paramedic and technical rescue specialist, she has trained and deployed SAR dogs at local, national, and international levels. She focuses on teaching SAR canine programs that integrate operational experience with evidence-based training, aiming to enhance the behavior of both handlers and dogs and ensure they perform exceptionally under real-world conditions.
Sally holds certifications from the KPA Professional Dog Trainer program, the University of Tennessee’s Canine Fitness Trainer program, and the University of Washington’s Animal Behavior program, in addition to a PhD in Applied Animal Behavior from Virginia Tech. Her research and future work focus on the intersection of welfare and performance of SAR and conservation detection dogs.
Dr. Erica Feuerbacher
Dr. Erica is a tenured Professor at Virginia Tech focusing on scientific and humane animal training, and improving animal welfare. She runs the Applied Animal Behavior & Welfare lab and is also the area coordinator for Virginia Tech's Master’s program in Applied Animal Behavior & Welfare, which is designed to provide behavior professionals with the scientific grounding for their practice and to broaden their understanding of behavior. The curriculum focuses on the fields of behavior analysis and ethology, which underpin applied animal behavior, and how we can apply those to make our behavioral interventions more humane and more effective.
Resources:
Dickinson S, Nita M, Aviles-Rosa EO, Hall N, Feuerbacher EN. 2025. Evaluating the effectiveness of participatory science dog teams to detect devitalized Spotted Lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) egg masses. PeerJ 13:e19656 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.19656
Dickinson S, Nita M, Aviles-Rosa EO, Hall N, Feuerbacher EN. 2026. Range of detection and naturalistic search performance for spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) egg masses. PeerJ 14:e21387 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.21387
Link to dog recruitment for future studies: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1575440987701045&id=100057054776068&post_id=100057054776068_1575440987701045&rdid=bPfc5YdgiGoWlWN3#