Heidi Elmendorf grew up wanting to be a veterinarian. As a teenager in upstate New York, she worked with a small-animal veterinarian on weekends and after school. And as an undergraduate at Princeton University in the late 1980s, Elmendorf spent a summer as an elephant caretaker at a zoo in Stuttgart, Germany, where she "learned how to feed elephants, bathe them, and shovel up after them," she says.












