Pusser said:
. . . However, the CAF does (or at least did at one point) have Medical Branch officers who are not doctors, nurses, etc and who are involved in research (I knew one years ago who was a biologist). We also have a medical research facility in Toronto (DCIEM - Defence and Civil Institute of Environmental Medicine). The only microbiology officer I've ever met though was a former lab technologist (an NCM occupation) who commissioned later in life. Your best bet is to get yourself to a Recruiting Centre and ask questions. However, be prepared for some funny looks. This is a small and very specialized field. You may need to be persistent.
Back in the dark ages, all Medical Branch officers, save physicians and nurses, were lumped into a single MOC -Medical Associate Officer (MAO) - with a multitude of sub-classifications . . . HCA, Pharmacist, Physio, PMed, Lab, Radiography, Bioscience . . . don't think I left anyone out, the dieticians became part of the Log branch as food service officers shortly after unification, even though there were a few uniformed "clinical dietician" slots at NDMC when it was a real hospital. If my memory remains of the 1980s, when we started to separate into distinct MOCs, the "CFR heavy" trades acquired the majority of its officers by that commissioning programme - HCA (with a heavy sprinkling of OT from pointy-end MOCs and UTPNCM), PMED and RAD (exclusively CFR), and LAB (mostly CFR from Lab Tech but there were, IIRC, a couple of DEO Lab Officers with PhDs in either microbiology or biochemistry). The Lab and Rad officers were almost exclusively posted to NDMC for actual clinical and management duties in their respective disciplines or as instructional staff for the Lab Tech and X-Ray Tech courses that we used to run in-house at NDMC. The labs at the CFHs were usually run by techs at the MWO/WO rank level.
Of course, none of that applies to the question posed by the OP. The CF never (well, at least I never heard of it) had any physicians who were certified in any form of laboratory medicine with the exception of the pathologists at NDMC. With the closure of that hospital (and others) as a tertiary care facility, so went the need for and education subsidization of a number of specialties and sub-specialities. At one time we had uniformed ENTs, Ophthalmologists, and Cardiologists (only at NDMC), a Urologist and a Dermatologist (at NDMC), an Oncologist (again NDMC, however there was some controversy about how she ended in that sub-specialty when she was sponsored for Internal Medicine) and of course that medical skill so needed in the military, Obstetrics and Gynecology (posting almost assured to either Lahr or Cold Lake).